‘Epistemic’ Conversation Analysis and ‘Radical’ Ethnomethodology: a hybrid study with a focus on advice.
Roman Pankow
10000813
Research Master’s social sciences, GSSS, University of Amsterdam
Supervisor: dr. Gerben Moerman
Second reader: dr. Bregje de Kok
14/04/2018 Amsterdam Summary The following master’s thesis ‘Epistemic’ Conversation Analysis and ‘Radical’ Ethnomethodology: a hybrid study with a focus on advice is motivated by a recent debate that emerged in the journal Discourse Studies edited by Teun van Dijk. In two special issues ‘The epistemics of Epistemics’ (Lynch & Macbeth 2016a) and ‘Epistemics – The rebuttal special issue’ (Drew 2018a) representatives of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis rallied to consider the recent research on “epistemics” in talk-in-interaction. By taking up the challenge of presenting a study in conversation analysis afflicted by the emergence of epistemics that is still recognizable as ethnomethodological, the study answers the question of how the conceptual tools developed in this epistemic research could be utilized to understand the methodological and conceptual repertoire of these two research traditions against this new horizon.
The thesis responds thereby to the invitation from ethnomethodologists commenting from the sidelines to consider the future of the discipline by orienting the research tools inwardly in search of a new course (cf. Anderson & Sharrock 2017) and functions thus as an original contribution to the emerging debate characterized by considering novelties in the conceptual repertoires from the standpoint of an invocation of the past. Since this invocation consists of the writings and teachings of Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, Gail Jefferson and Harold Garfinkel remembered through the references and citations found in the writings of the clashing authors, the study starts with an overview of this past in search of central theoretical and methodological notions that could be reconsidered through the lens of epistemics. This results in a presentation of the methodological policies for understanding actors and actions through the central conversation analytical methodology of the next turn proof procedure. After the epistemic innovations are discussed, the Jeffersonian renderings of naturally occurring advice sequences in preventive pediatric health services in a large municipality in the Netherlands will be introduced. This corpuses enables a demonstration of showing the practical contingencies inherent in conceptual glosses. Conversation analysis afflicted with epistemic research is shown to point to the what else underlying the asymmetries of the action “advice” in conversation analytical institutional talk research and invites a reconsideration of neighboring notions as “actor” “member” and “identity” through two extended case analyses. These concepts and their usage in literature seem to obscure the practical accomplishments necessary for their recognizability as concepts. Furthermore, since the epistemic literature seems to rely on unexamined commonsense relationships between “actor”, “action” and “institution”, a suggestion will be made to understand these conceptual relationships as practical accomplishments.
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Contents Summary ...... 1 Introduction...... 3 Ethnomethodological Roots ...... 6 Theoretical/methodological framework ...... 10 “Policies” of Ethnomethodology in relation to Conversation Analysis ...... 10 Formalizing descriptions ...... 11 Understanding ...... 12 Members/Identities– Indexicality/Context– Actions/Actors ...... 13 Next turn proof procedure ...... 16 Accounting for the epistemic order ...... 18 The analytic “armamentarium” relevant to the epistemic research agenda ...... 19 Hydraulics ...... 20 Oh and other potential indexes for assessing knowledge status...... 22 Spatial metaphors: creeks in status and open realms ...... 23 Deontic authority ...... 25 Ethics, corpus and transcriptions ...... 26 Advice: a reading ...... 28 Advice extent of the definition: preliminary observations ...... 29 Advice: Practices in sight ...... 32 Advice formation: The importance of knowledge transmission ...... 35 Advice and knowledge: the role of asymmetries ...... 38 Deontic underpinning: contested rejectables ...... 41 Advice and “identity” or a focus on actors ...... 44 Conclusion and reflection ...... 52 Literature ...... 54 Appendix A ...... 62 (Field)Notes ...... 63
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Introduction In the most recent newsletter of the EMCA section of the American Sociological Association, chairs Liberman and Nishizaka describe the current predicament of the section as a “glass half full” (2018: 1-3). Lively debates are organized, but the section struggles with maintaining the required minimum of 150 members as their numbers started to diminish after reaching this in 2013. Albeit the newsletter is addressed to the “dear EMCA Community”, a curious look into one of the leading contemporary publication outlets for professionals working in this community, Discourse Studies, suggests that the joining of the EM of Ethnomethodology and the CA of Conversation Analysis could be described as a precarious situation.
Against a background rife with orientations to leading figures from the disciplines’ past, a discussion emerged in and around two special issues of this journal, ‘The epistemics of Epistemics’ (Lynch & Macbeth 2016a) and ‘Epistemics – the rebuttal’ (Drew 2018a) (mapped in figure 1), that show clear cleavages in potential future trajectories of what is currently presented to the rest of professional sociology as kindred endeavors. Whereas the authors responsible for the ‘epistemics of Epistemics’ special issue position themselves as inspired by what was once ‘radical’ in ethnomethodology the latter set of authors is defending innovations, specifically around the theme of epistemics, within the field of conversation analysis. As subsequent interventions and digitally published rejoinders based on draft materials suggest that the future of the disciplines is at stake, it might be disheartening to note that arguments range from being focused on theoretical issues to ad hominems to highly specific technical discussions about the correct line for placing a pause in transcriptions. One might thus start to question the extent in which proponents of these research traditions should really be addressed as one “dear … community”.
Figure 1. A representation of the EMCA community directly involved with the two special issues of Discourse Studies, a journal edited by Teun van Dijk.i
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While ethnomethodologists from Manchester were invited by the guest editor of the epistemics of Epistemic special issue, Michael Lynch, to share their concerns about the disciplines in light of this new research on epistemics, they, as per Anderson (2016) remained characteristically indifferent and were not especially concerned with this trend of “constructivism”.ii Although the special issue cast the research on epistemics of Heritage (e.g. 2008; 2011; 2012a; 2012b; 2012c; 2012d; 2013a), some co-authored with Geoffrey Raymond (2005; 2006; 2012), as requiring a restatement of what made ethnomethodology and conversation analysis ‘radical’ vis-à-vis conventional social sciences, Lynch had to note that his question of what to do now was “backward looking: [by] holding present-day ethnomethodology and CA accountable to the programmatic writings and exemplary studies by founders of those fields” (2016a: 24). In return Douglas W. Maynard and Steven E. Clayman (2018) criticized the authors of epistemics of Epistemics in their contribution to the Rebuttal issue in support of Heritage, because their usage of the term “radical” lacks a proper definition. Something they find in the Oxford English Dictionary which enables them to point out that the mistakes of the so called ‘radicals’ were already found in the work of Egon Bittner when he described such movements (1963). It is in this light of these derailing arguments that the recent suggestion of Anderson & Sharrock (2017) of reorienting ethnomethodology to its own body of work to envision a road ahead more clearly seems like a helpful suggestion. iii
The remainder of this thesis manuscript will thus be an attempt of work in the organization of a recognizable future oriented study for the EMCA community afflicted by these recent debates about the merits of “epistemics” as part of the research procedures in conversation analysis. It thereby answers the question of how the conceptual tools developed in the epistemic research could be utilized to understand the methodological and conceptual repertoire of these two research traditions against this new horizon. As such it immediately encounters the principle question raised in the first publication of Harvey Sacks. Namely of how “description [is] to be warranted when, however long or intensive it be, it may nonetheless be indefinitely extended?” (Sacks 1963: 10)” iv. It seems well known in the circles of EMCA that a solution is found in what has been called the etcetera clause. A clause that indicates that retrospectively other facets than initially described might also bear relevance or that “even purported descriptions of particular objects neglect some undetermined set of their features” (Sacks 1963: 13, emp. in original; cf. Garfinkel 1967: 73- 74). As many thorough descriptions of the conversation analytical work appeared in text book accounts over the years (e.g. Hutchby & Wooffitt 1998; Ten Have 2007; Clift 2016), an attempt is made to represent conversation analysis in light of the factors that lead to the emergence of the etcetera problem. These factors are that descriptions are written in a language that is itself not analyzed and that descriptions appeal to common experience (Sacks 1963: 16). The third factor, that the object of description is itself a developing and changing object, remains an ongoing problem for this thesis.
To discuss the conceptual innovations of epistemics as contribution to a discipline that is averse to “theoretical ambiguities” that are “produced and solved without surfacing” in the process of analysis and writing (Schegloff 1984: 50; cf. Lindwall et al. 2016: 504; Heritage
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2018: 38-39), the discussion between the proponents of ‘epistemic’ conversation analysis and ‘radical’ ethnomethodology and their remembrances of the past will be approached as relating a way of work that bears relevance to what has been glossed as the “EMCA community”. This circumvention is inspired by the early ethnomethodological approach of engaging with descriptive texts as practical tutorials (Garfinkel 2002; cf. Rawls 2006: 26) and more recent investigations in the organization of bibliographies and literature lists a researchable phenomenon of order through reading and comparison (Carlin 2007; 2009). This results in a discussion of the ‘policies’, to adopt Garfinkel’s term, of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis affected by the emerging discussion on epistemics. This is followed by an exposition of an explicitized theoretical framework drawn from the tools provided by Heritage accompanied by other complementary indexes based on work on ‘deontics’ and discursive psychology.
To furtherly enable the purpose of presenting a conversation analytical study a corpus of recordings of interactions in preventive pediatric health care services in a large municipality in the Netherlands will be studied. While others writing for the professional medical field have noted the large array of practices that might be present in these recording (e.g. Luijks 2017; American Academy of Pediatrics 2017), presenting a new et cetera problem in itself, the focus while lay on the central practice of advice giving in these services. This because the practice was initially paradigmatically described in the work of Heritage, co-authored with Sefi (1992) and Lindström (2012), and presents a recognizable practices that is by definition relevant to the proposals in his research on epistemics. Comparable to the ‘radical’ ethnomethodologists presentation of “oh” in the early work of Heritage (e.g. 1984a) as an early announcement of what they consider a turn to “cognitivism” and “informationism” (cf. Macbeth et al 2016; Macbeth & Wong 2016; Lynch & Wong 2016), “advice” giving lends itself for a practical account of the contemporary juncture in conversation analysis. This because studying the fundamental asymmetrical dimensions of advice giving on a turn by turn basis results in reconsidering the interactional contingency inherent in what is glossed as “actor” as both advice affecting and being affected by advice in the recordings of the preventive youth health care meetings in a large municipality in the Netherlands. While efforts are currently made to keep “juggernauts” as linguistics (Lynch 2016a: 18) or psychology at bay in conversation analytical research, this thesis argues that even within the codifications of epistemics there remains ample room to analyze interaction in its local specificities. Before showing this some academic and historical context is provided that raises a relief to address the data from a position indebted to the rich and enduring work of what is now considered the EMCA community
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Ethnomethodological Roots The studies of interactions that developed under the name of “conversation analysis” are often described as “the most successful off-shoot” (Ten Have 2002) or “outgrowth” (Heritage 2009) of Ethnomethodology and is as such concerned with “the methods people use in doing social life” as Harvey Sacks puts it eloquently (1984a: 21). While Sacks claimed that “there is no other way that conversation is being studied systematically except my way” (1992: 549), his talk about conversation analysis developed in close collaboration with Harold Garfinkel (cf. Silverman 1998; Schegloff 1992; Ten Have 2007: 6) in what was once infamously described as the “re-enchantment industry” that emerged on Californian campus grounds (Gellner 1975).
While later doubts will be discussed, Garfinkel, as the founder of the field of “ethnomethodology”v, presented the pioneering work of Sacks at various points in his life as exemplars of ethnomethodological studies (e.g. 1988; Hill & Crittenden 1986).vi Garfinkel’s presentation of what these studies in “ethnomethodology” were about ranged from more complex descriptions as “[the] organizational study of a member's knowledge of his ordinary affairs, of his own organized enterprises, where that knowledge is treated by us as part of the same setting that it also makes orderable” (Hill & Crittenden 1968: 10) to the more simple statement that ethnomethodology is concerned with the “routine grounds of everyday actions” in his foundational Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967). While groundbreaking this publication was initially met with embarrassing dismissal in some circles of established and establishing sociology. Fellow sociologist James Coleman famously called the text a “non- book” full of “points which are so commonplace that they would appear banal if stated in straightforward English” (1968: 126, 130) and Lewis Coser associated ethnomethodology with a “symptom of the decline of a discipline” in his Presidential address to the American Sociology Association (1975: 695).vii
Against this background conversation analysis, as a kindred discipline wherein “talk itself was the action” (Schegloff 1992: 8) had to find home initially in journals of linguistics, anthropology and pragmatic philosophy. While contemporary scholars commemorate this as part of the development of conversation analysis into a truly interdisciplinary in their introductions in hand books (e.g. Stivers & Sidnell 2013), recent writings for fellow conversation analysts ponder if other social scientists would not still look to the field as a “branch of the occult” (Levinson 2013: 105) or even if kindred conversation analysists would not view their methodological plea for the common social science method of coding as “heretical” (Stivers 2015).
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Figure 2. A representation of the relevant part of the EMCA community.
Such self-reflexive statements are not surprising when one considers the waves of internal criticisms that rippled the scenes of EMCA earlier whereof two points are made relevant in the recent discussion in Discourse studies (see figure 2 for a representation of these scenes). First, two years after Sack’s untimely passing Gail Jefferson felt reason to express a “wild side” of conversation analysis as “an antidote to the drastically constricted version of the field” that appeared after the publication of Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson’s paper ‘A simplest systematics for the organization of Turn-taking for Conversation’ (1974) (Jefferson 1996: 2). A point also taken up by Garfinkel when he wrote in an unpublished paper:
“Latter day CA which, since Harvey Sacks’ death [in 1975], insists upon coded turns’ sequentially organized ways of speaking of talk and structure, makes talk out as structure’s mandarins: ruling it, insiders to everything that counts, dreaming science, all dignity, pedantic, and corporately correct. These ways make talk out as really the just what all concerns with structure could have been about, and, to the point of these remarks, the just what ethnomethodological concerns with structure could have been about” (Garfinkel et al., 1988: 65 as per Lynch 2016a: 14).
As Maynard and Clayman (2018) and Drew (2018b) note in their contribution to the rebuttal special issue, Michael Lynch used this quotation, amongst others, throughout his career to present conversation analysis after the turn-taking paper as an increasingly “corporate community” (e.g. Lynch 1993: 233; Lynch 2000: 521). Something that resembles a more familiar narrative of Harold Garfinkel who enjoyed close collaboration with Sacks (e.g. Garfinkel & Sacks 1970; cf. Lynch 2017), but did not pursue such relationships with Schegloff and Jefferson (cf. Rawls 2008: 726). Emanuel “Manny” Schegloff is in this recurrent ethnomethodological narrative cast as the figure who worked towards codifying the approach with his numerous contributions and “disciplinary” accounts of the history of the discipline (cf. Lynch 2000; Carlin 2010).
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While the result of this work has been called one of the rare instances of a “normal” science in sociology by observant outsiders (e.g. Law & Lodge 1984: 283)viii, those of a more ethnomethodological bent started to note from at least the 1980s that there were many losses involved by a too restrictive focus on talk in the studies of the situated production of orderly phenomena (e.g. Atkinson 1988; Anderson 2016). The variety of topics and more and less systematic approaches found in the published lectures of Sacks alongside his quip that “conversations were something to begin with” (1984a: 25-26), are then pressed as fitting the myriad of ethnomethodological studies that were possible. They are now cast as contrived by an overtly restrictive focus on turn-taking in conversation. However, Schegloff is throughout his career similarly insistent on the point that conversation analysis is not solely concerned with conversations alone, but with talk-in-interaction or even broader interaction as the “primordial site of sociality” (e.g. 1987: 102). Tirelessly stressing that the fundamental tools of conversation analysis to study the generic properties of interaction are rich and rewarding by itself (cf. 1997; 1999; 2007a), he is credited by Garfinkel (1996: 8), cited by Lynch (2000: 520) for pressing that the objects of ethnomethodology have to be actually found out and cannot be imagined (2000: 520). The authors of the Rebuttal special issue seem to have difficulties with grasping this dual functioning of Schegloff in ethnomethodological writing as both a codifier and a keeper of the radical spirit of Conversation Analysis. Drew calls Lynch an “unreliable guide” since he “critiques Sacks and Schegloff with the same warmth with which he now […] endorses them in recruiting them to his team in his critique of Heritage” (2018b: 9, emp. in original).ix While this critique of Heritage will be taken up again in the next chapter, a second branch of criticism also becomes relevant in the discussion of advice as an action done by actors. Namely the one that did not emerge from the inheritance of Sacks and the ‘Simplest Systematics…’ paper, but from an increased popularity of the approach when it turned from what has been glossed as “classic” to a more “applied” conversation analysis (cf. Ten Have 2007). A set of studies that are, to utilize an older pair of terms, no longer geared to finding a priori structures as adjacency pairs, expansions and the organization of repairs as the central describable actions, but on contingent structures related to the environment where the talk was occasioned (cf. Coulter 1983).x Whereas the former set of structures were thought of as part of the machineries through which people talked (cf. Sacks 1992 passim), the latter were occasioned by specific institutional environments (cf. Drew & Heritage 1992). The argument of the critical ethnomethodologist took a by now familiar shape of stressing the neglect of the what’s more in this institutional talk research, since it is not only too focused on the sequential ordering of talk, but it neglects thereby the other competences involved in being a successful participant in specific institutional interactions (cf. Hester & Francis 2000; Watson 2000). Furthermore, the “pessimistic” view argued that showing relevance and consequences of an institutional environment through sequential ordering lacks the empirical weight to consider institutional talk as sufficiently distinct from mundane conversations. This because the sequential orderings in the institutional setting are also found in mundane talk-in-interaction. While Schegloff initially suggested cautiousness when extending analysis to attend for institutional feature and challenged the researchers to show the relevance of their notions in the details of talk-in-interaction (cf. 1991), he more recently recognized that he defended an approach that focused on “actions” while others attempted to
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develop analyses of “actors” (cf. 2010). As the contemporary field of EMCA is thus based on diverging orientations that could be attributed to different stances taken towards the import of texts and teachings in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, the claim that conversation analysis should be considered a ‘paradigm’ seems at odds with publicized accounts. The next chapter will thus start with a different view on the potential for divergent paths of research in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis that, combined with the two branches of criticism on the limiting focus on talk and the applied focus on institutions, forms the background to the “analytic mentality” (cf. Schenkhein 1978) of conversation analysis presented as concerned with formalizing understanding of members in context through their actions with help of the next turn proof procedure. These notions will be specified with help of the conceptual developments in and around epistemic research in order to assess the reliance on theoretical notions of this armamentarium through the analysis of data on advice giving practices in child health centres in the Netherlands.
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Theoretical/methodological framework
“Policies” of Ethnomethodology in relation to Conversation Analysis While there were ridiculing descriptions abound in the early days of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis based on their concerns with “apolitical trivia”, as per Coulter (1976), the late Sudnow (2006)xi remarked in an infamous Wikipedia contribution that he and Garfinkel “sat, once, through a half hour of a chemistry lecture and then had a half hour conversation afterwards, and this becomes a 'jointly published' article”xii. These descriptions seem to indicate that the research “policies”, as Garfinkel used to call them, of ethnomethodology were odd in the landscape of established sociological methodologies. One only has to recall the most famous exemplars of ethnomethodology, the breaching experiments, done by undergraduate students and Garfinkel himself to make the “common place scenes visible” (cf. 1967: 36f.). As such one of the merits of an ethnomethodological study is to be found in their instructive or pedagogical character (cf. Rawls 2002; Lynch 2012), not as a contribution to the literature canons of the “worldwide social science movement” to which ethnomethodology functions as its “alternate” and professes indifference “as a policy… [or]… research practice” (Garfinkel 2002: 171). While Garfinkel mentioned in numerous writings his work on a bibliographical collection, with related corpus status, of ethnomethodology (e.g. 1988; cf. Carlin 2007; Lynch 2012), his ‘indifference’ as “first segment of instructed action” claims not an abandonment of literature but a recognition that it is not needed to study activities as work (Garfinkel 2002: 170). While the studies that stemmed from these early days had a broad range from Sudnow’s investigations playing piano, typewriting and achieving a highs core in the computer game Breakout (2001; 1979; 1983) to the earliest laboratory studies from a social sciences perspective (Lynch 1985) to studies in the foundational elements of mathematics (e.g. Livingston 1986), they could all fall under the rubric of what Garfinkel called from the early 1970s onwards the “study of work programme” (cf. Hester & Francis 2004: 21; Lynch 2015). Aside from these studies of work, wherein methods of so called members were learned, a different genre of ethnomethodological studies mostly identified with Sacks was based on recordings and transcriptions of what came to be known as “naturally occurring data”.xiii While some readings of Ethnomethodology’s Program (Garfinkel 2002) suggest that the methodologies of social science disciplines inevitably distort the phenomena of lived society (cf. Livingston 2003; Wilson 2003), the radical position found in epistemics of Epistemics argues that it is the contribution of epistemics that furtherly distorts the “analytic mentality” of conversation analysis (cf. Schenkhein 1978). This mentality was by Schenkhein first and foremost identified by the form of the material, recordings and transcriptions, since it are however the principles of analyses that are contested the next chapter starts with an introduction of these followed by a presentation of the epistemic innovations. Thereafter the data will be introduced and transcription conventions will be discussed.
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Formalizing descriptions Akin to principles of “ethnomethodology”, conversation analysis, as a set of research procedures, consists of studying the organization of actions through the actions of what once were called members in a specific social situation. With their groundbreaking paper in 1974 Sacks et al. provided a description of this organization for conversations as a systematics of turn-taking. These systematics provided a descriptive, formalized specification of the organization of interaction in what Garfinkel (2002) considered, years before “ethnomethodology”, as locally situated time referred to as “sequential”. As “any sign can signify anything” (Garfinkel 2002: 106) understanding is made possible against the horizon of a developing order of sequences of embodied interaction (cf. Rawls 2002; Rawls 2005). The ‘Simplest systematics…’ project was an attempt to describe this order of sequences and resources utilized in actual talk-in-interaction, understood as a rule governed system. While emerging in the tumultuous and charged background of American Cold War sociology, the “turn taking system”, as social scientific description, was by itself proposed as having a “‘context-free’, ‘context-sensitive’ status”. The system was presented as a “vehicle for interaction between parties with any potential identities, and with any potential familiarity” (Sacks et al 1974: 699-700). By focusing on the conduct made possible by shared understanding, the central question for a sequential analysis of this vehicle, that is being employed by both participants and analysts alike, becomes “why that now?” (Schegloff & Sacks 1973: 229). An issue that pivots on what is being done by ‘that’ (Schegloff 2007b: 2), that seems to be placed in the context of the “now” based on the assumption there is a describable organized relationship, or “why”, between the two. This relationship is shown to depend on the sequential organization of turns taken in conversation, or sequentially ordered “that”s”, through mechanisms of what has been described as turn taking system, “adjacency pairs” (cf. Schegloff & Sacks 1973) and the organization of “repair” (cf. Schegloff et al. 1977). As such the focal point of this form of analysis is the organization of actions (cf. Schegloff 2010). Actions that are first and foremost interpreted through the usage and understandings displayed by the studied ‘members’. Before turning to the procedures for describing acting members in their specific situation, the decisive role of understanding will be discussed followed by the defining methodological resource in the next turn proof principle.
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Understanding
As one of the central problematics of social scientific research that deals with the et cetera problem is the unexamined reliance of a common language used in social scientific research (cf. Sacks 1963), the ethnomethodological “incommensurable… asymmetrically alternate” (cf. Garfinkel 1996: 9-11) provides research policies geared towards a descriptive analysis based on the understandings displayed by members engaged in practices. The understanding of a sequentially located action is first and foremost a members’ problem, as it are they who:
“continually, there and then without recourse to follow up tests, mutual examination of memoirs, surprise quizzes and other ways of checking on understanding demonstrate to one another that they understood or failed to understand the talk they are party to” (Moerman & Sacks 1988).
As such the interactions of the parties in the conversations are understood to do this continuous understanding based on their understanding of what happened before and project possibilities for subsequent understandings. As what happens next functions as the principle provider of interpretative context (Rawls 2005), as sequential time, the actions done through talk could thus be considered as both “context shaped” and “context renewable” (cf. Heritage 1984a). Because what is being done is understood within the context of prior actions and projects a context to interpret what follows. What seems to be at stake in the discussion on the pages of Discourse Studies is to what extent the analysis of “there and then” should be supported by a descriptive apparatus that is not stemming from the work of the members, but is supposedly part of theoretical imagination. The next section will thus problematize working with these notions often found in the relevant literature and the main methodological tool for discipline, the “next turn proof procedure” (cf. Sacks et al. 1974: 728-729) in order to have sufficient relief to consider the epistemic innovations in the next chapters.
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Members/Identities– Indexicality/Context– Actions/Actors The use of the notion of “members” in the previous sections was not only evocation of classical ethnomethodological terminology, but points also to one of the central problematics when confronted with a piece of naturally occurring data studied for the purpose of descriptive social science. As Jefferson mentioned in her ‘Letter to the Editor’, occasioned by Pomerantz’s (1989) plea for “translating” conversation analysis technical vocabulary to vernacular terms, it might be
“conductive to good dialogue […] to start out with a clear sense of […] the alien character of conversation analysis. It is a field after all, founded by a man who took the position that humans are no more anthropomorphizable than, say, algae” (1989: 429)
One of the self-styled “quixotic” statements of Sacks (1992: 536) that reads quite puzzling, as it is not uncommon to interpret people talking in recordings as more anthropomorphic than other organisms.xiv However, by prioritizing actions as the focus points for descriptions Sacks attempted to move away from ascribing motives, emotions and similar stuff. This in line with Garfinkel’s famous, according to Heritage (2018: 23), quip that “there is no reason to look under the skull since nothing of interest is to be found there except brains” (1963: 190). The notion of “member” is an attempt to move away from such a motivational understanding and puts the situational and action based aspects first, since these result in recognizable members regardless of any “internal activity” (cf. Garfinkel 2006: 51).
This focus on recognizabilty is sometimes cast as [Edward] Shils’ problem or complaint, because he presumably argued in the company of other sociologists that “we’ll learn what about a jury’s deliberation makes them a small group. But we want to know what about their deliberations makes them a jury” (Garfinkel et al. 1981: 133). While Shils reportedly became convinced that the second question was the wrong one, this was not the case for Garfinkel who was also in attendance. For him it was first and foremost the situational properties in their local then-and-there specificities that should be considered formative for the mutual recognizability of social identity. Something echoed in the conversation analyses as pursued by Schegloff, founded on “the dangerous idea” that the social order, including the various identities, is the product of local interaction (cf. Levinson 2005).
As such the macro and the micro level of analyses are considered linked, but it is in the specificities of local interaction that identities come about analytically. In a noteworthy recorded conversation that resulted in the co-authored ‘On Formal Structures of Practical Action’ (Sacks & Garfinkel 1970), Sacks noted that “if a member were to say, “It’s nice to have you here with us.” A researcher would find himself engaged in doing such things as giving that statement a name, telling us where “here” is, who “us” are, and things like that” (1967 cited in Lynch 2017). These terms, understood as “indexical expressions” (cf. Bar- Hillel 1954; Garfinkel 1967: 4-5) rely according to ethnomethodology and conversation analysis for their meaning on the actions undertaken in their sequential context.
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This context was presented as an alternate to the context found when other social scientists were deemed the ‘community of relevance’ (cf. Schegloff 1999) that would follow the fixating impulses of “constructive analysis” or “formal analysis” in which “the world wide social science movement” is engaged (Garfinkel & Wieder 1992). The ethnomethodological alternative would suggest that a potential place suggested by “here” or the membership category suggested by “us” should by studied as something uniquely accomplished each and every time. While Schegloff stressed in an earlier dispute about the developments of Membership Categorization Analysis the merits of sequential analysis in his ‘Tutorial’ (2007a), Carlin (2010) rightfully noted that the Sacks once proclaimed that:
‘‘What I want to be able to say is, that there can be ways of invoking the fact of a setting, and a bunch of its features, whatever the features are of settings; without having to do a formulation of a setting, and specifically without using an omni-relevant formulation of the setting’’ (Sacks 1976: G4 as per Carlin 2010: 259)
However, aside from a formal description of the order of the ‘there and then’ as sequential environment achieved through interaction, the research on “institutional talk” noted in their studies of sequential interaction in news interviews (e.g. Clayman & Whalen 1988), the court room (e.g. Atkinson & Drew 1979), police telephone recordings (e.g. Zimmerman 1984) and medical settings (e.g. Atkinson & Heath 1981) that there were enduring local specificities in the talk-in-these-contexts to be found that made them differ from mundane conversations.
Whereas for Garfinkel the social identity would be a local phenomenon of order*, the burgeoning institutional talk agenda presented the relationship the other way around. As Heritage writes that talk in institutions is not only oriented to the goals of the institutions but that identities are seen as mediating factors as the goals are “tied to their institution-relevant identities” (2005: 106). These identities are differentiated from the more classical interactional identities and roles as “story teller, news deliverer, sympathizer” (Heritage & Clayman 2010: 43) by the more specific, and enduring, institutional character and the obligations they come with. As such Heritage presents the latter “identities” not as one of the possible orientations, but as the one mediating between institutional context and talk-in- interaction. Examples he provides are paired identities of actors as “teacher and student” and “doctors and patient”, researched with reference to a larger set of “professionals” and “lay- people” (cf. Heritage 2005: 106-107). Two categories of actors, or discourse identities, often discussed in terms of foundational asymmetrical relationships in the applied conversation analytical literature (cf. Pilnick & Dingwall 2011). While such a persisting feature of inequality in talk should be conceived of as produced through situated interaction, but seems to form a constitutive part of the research on institutional talk (cf. Ten Have 1991).
While this research of institutional talk has been called a “program” by Heritage, he and the authors of the Rebuttal special issue insist that his epistemic research does not constitute such a program that breaks from the “turn-taking machinery” found in Sacks et al. (1974) as the critics imply. However, with the introduction of terms as “status” and “stance” the asymmetrical relationships found between the conceptual renderings of interacting people or
14 actors, pivots crucially on asymmetry in the dimensions of knowledge. About this contestable knowledge
“we might conclude that, since the languages of the world uniformly make grammatical distinctions between interrogative and declarative utterances and deploy them with enormous frequency, the entire human race is inclined to take an interest in who has knowledge of what and when and to treat it with care” (Heritage 2018: 17).
As Heritage notes the specific tasks and obligations that make up the asymmetrical relationships between speakers are not, as the critics claimed, “hidden” but are commonly or constantly oriented to through interactions as it is an inclination of our race to be interested herein. While these relationships echo Sacks’ (1972) early membership categorization analysis in terms of “standardized relational pairs” such as husband-wife, doctor-patient, student-teacher with typical or predicated rights and obligations between them. And, as for example Hester & Francis (2004: 40) note, invoking one part of the pair implies the other. Albeit this allows for clustered relationships on different scales, such as a parents and child pair encapsulated by an medical professional and lay person pairing, further potential differentiations, between for example doctors, nurses and interns, obliges that both the parties and the analyst to show how the relationships are made relevant as pairs. Albeit reducing the analytical scope to the dimension of epistemics makes this possible by positioning people as either more or less knowledgeable relative to another, there are also statements found in Heritage that seems to suggest a move in the other direction and an import of the macro to the micro. For example when he writes about societal positions in the “West” (2012c: 77). Before turning towards an attempt to save the research on epistemics from this position of relying on understandings based on extra-interactional abstraction, a classical methodological resource will be discussed, followed by an account of the innovations presented by Heritage. This will allows for a discussion of the data in the context of a medical constellation oriented to by the parties engaged in talk-in-interaction that affects their status as actors and enables an understanding of the contested informational grounds that define their actions.
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Next turn proof procedure Founded on the sequential understanding of interaction that emerged in these ethnomethodological and conversation analytic circles, is the “next-turn proof procedure”. This procedure is presented in the turn-tacking paper as “a central methodological resource” (Sacks et al. 1974: 728-729). A resource that is a fundamental characteristic of the organization of conversation, wherein “a turn's talk will display its speaker's understanding of a prior turn's talk, and whatever other talk it marks itself as directed to”. It functions as such as the gateway to an analytical interpretation of a turn through the interpretations found in the next turn. The status of this “proof procedure” found an early critic in Coulter (1983) who noted that there is little reason to prioritize the understanding found in the subsequent turn over the understanding that might have been meant in the production of the turn (1983: 370-71). Furthermore, he is averse of the connotation of the term “proof”, as it suggests that this interpretation through next-turns should be considered definite. A criticism also found in the epistemics of Epistemics special issue where Macbeth & Wong note that it is not “really about proving” but should be considered the usage of “vernacular reckonings to discipline our professional reckonings, by consulting how the parties discipline their own” (2016: 586). This is congruent with Schegloff’s insistence on presenting the procedure as one of the defining features of conversation analysis in his Primer (2007) and tireless efforts to stress that it functions as a restraint on possible interpretations (e.g. 1996: 172).
While Heritage (2012d: 387) cites Levinson’s “for every motivation (or context) in the hand, there are five in the bush” favorably to indicate the necessity of working with a methodological principle that limits possible interpretations, his critics state that coinciding with the emergence of epistemics he and Levinson also started to steer away from what the latter described as the “soft underbelly” of Conversation Analysis that “is one of the reasons that other disciplines sometimes think of CA as a branch of the occult” (Levinson 2013:105; cf. Macbeth & Wong 2016: 586; Macbeth 2016: 14f.).xv Something Heritage also seems favorable towards when he notes with some regret that “action was examined through the lens of reaction, and the consideration of sequential positioning took precedence over examination of the composition of the turns themselves” (2012a:2) and that epistemic orientations in interaction are underlying the organization of sequences and adjacency pairs on which the next turn proof procedure is founded (cf. 2012b).
While Heritage mentions that he did “have plenty of use” for the next turn proof procedure (2018: 28), his project is in large parts a development of the resources for interpreting turns through their deployment, which is also mentioned as a central analytical resource discussed in recent textbook accounts of the methodology of conversation analysis (cf. Clayman & Gill 2004; 2012). However, in contrast to earlier research on preference structures as a product of turn design are Heritage’s analytical resources presented as a departure from “the relatively highly defined domain of adjacency pairs” (Heritage 2012b: 48). The resources that he offers to make an analysis per turn possible are morphosyntax, intonation and, most importantly, orientations to the epistemic domain (cf. Heritage 2012a: 4). This domain, understood as prior to the organization of sequences and actions, fits other
16 recent suggestions of “second-order” organizations that were recently developed in the circles of conversation analysists currently working at the UCLA (e.g. Stivers & Robinson 2006).
Although these “second-order” proposals, to lent the terms of Heritage’s student Stivers (co-authored with Robinson 2006), still imply that the organization found in the simplest systematics is the principle one, the “pressures” or “drives” emerging in these new orders affect the organization of sequences and are as such at least positioned as equally fundamental. While such proposals about extra-sequential pressures or interpretative schemes for action formation were thought of as leading “inevitably [to] ‘wrestling with Manny’” (Levinson 2013: 129), it are now not only conversation analysts but also ethnomethodologists who raise an account of Schegloff’s work against the new resources for understanding talk- in-interaction. The concurrent presentation of Heritage’s epistemic research in this thesis will follow a tripartite structure consisting of hydraulics, spatial metaphors and a deontic and discursive addition to the interface that, taken together, form alongside the data the basis for the description of conversation analytical work that both interprets turns of talk through single turns as through subsequent understandings.
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Accounting for the epistemic order While the transmission of knowledge in interaction was an older theme in Conversation Analytical literature already present in Sack’s lectures (1992) and epistemology, as a term for working with knowledge in conversation, was sporadically researched (e.g. Goodwin 1979; Koshik 2003), it was with a pair of papers on epistemic authority as socially established in assessment sequences, co-authored with Geoffrey Raymond (2005, 2006), that Heritage introduced epistemics as a research theme that has been adopted in a wide variety of contemporary research (cf. Drew 2018a; 2018b). While Heritage protests against proposing a research “program” (cf. 2018), the strain of research has at least been presented as “key topic” in contemporary conversation analysis (Heritage 2012d).
Furthermore, while the authors of the Rebuttal special issue dispute the usage of ‘radical’ by the Epistemic of epistemics authors in their self-identification as ‘radical ethnomethodology’ (cf. Drew 2018b; Cliff & Maynard 2018), it was a supportive Drew who heralded these proposals of Heritage as “quite radical” and representing a “novel departure and direction” in conversation analysis (2012: 63). Albeit Drew followed this assessment with expressing his struggles with conceptualizing succinctly what these radical and profound understanding entailed, the following pages provide an attempt to cover the wide ranging conceptual innovations found in the work of epistemics by Heritage. These encompass not only metaphors as engines, contested territories and a ticker, but also analytical terms as authority, status, stance and codes as “K+” and “K-”. This will result in an interface of epistemic interaction helpful in the understanding of the interactions presented in the chapter thereafter.
The persistent orientation to an enacted order of epistemics was developed in research wherein Heritage asked how people distinguish between utterances as statements or questions (2012a). In line with the pragmatist arguments raised in earlier Conversation Analysis, Heritage found that orientations to the epistemic domain trump morphosyntax and intonation in determining, or recognizing, actions. This orientation is not only important in determining of a statement is a request or delivery of information, but Heritage writes confidentially that “it may nonetheless play a fundamental role in the determination of higher-order actions such as requests, offers, proposals, suggestions, compliments, and complaints, to name but a few” (Heritage 2012a: 25-26). One of the ‘higher-order actions’ that is, in the light of Heritage’s earlier work (Heritage & Sefi 1992; Heritage & Lindström 2012), curiously absent is the practice of “advice” giving. An action not only introduced to the conversation analytical research agenda by Heritage, but also an action that is by definition understood as determined by interactionally established asymmetrical access to knowledge.
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The analytic “armamentarium” relevant to the epistemic research agendaxvi While Heritage’s proposals are themselves presented as novel in the tradition of conversation analysis by supporters, those more critical have made much of the repertoire from which he draws to support his breaks, or shift, from the established principles and procedures in his research on epistemics. The epistemics of Epistemics authors suggest that his work is founded on “the three Gs” of Garfinkel, Goffman and Grice (Lynch & Wong: 543), while the latter two are explicitly named as not being conversation analysis and critiqued from this stance by Schegloff (1988; 2001)xvii, they note a strong resemblance between the title of his central concept and a paper of cognitivist philosophers and psychologists Churchland & Churchland (1983)xviii, and a general tendency to look for connection with linguistics and a social science programme geared to quantifications.
On the other hand, Heritage was a student of Schegloff, was among the earliest Britons to write a paper in conversation analysis (Heritage 2018: 23), and has written an authoritative account of Ethnomethodology (1984b). Furthermore, there are references abound in his epistemic papers to those with a far less questionable status in the canon, because alongside Garfinkel, Sacks and Schegloff feature Pomerantz (1980), Goodwin (1979), Terasaki (2004) and more recent scholars in the conversation analytical tradition as Kamio (1997). The result is a diverse theoretical array of notions to understand communicative interaction that could be presented as envisioning the workings of the “interaction order”, to lend a term from Goffman (per Heritage 2009), based on hydraulic and spatial metaphors or concepts. The armamentarium that could be constructed from these texts is visually represented in figure 3, consisting of at least two speakers represented by K+ and K- by virtue of their access to epistemic domains. Something interactionally established akin to hydraulics and vigilantly followed by a ticker indexed by numerous devices ranging from “oh” to rhetorical questions.
Figure 3. A representation of the utilized armamentarium for analyzing epistemics.
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Hydraulics As Harvey Sacks, according to Coulter (1976: 509), and Gail Jefferson (1972: 294) styled themselves as a technicians, it might come to no surprise that the discourse in the published lectures is rife with terms as “gadgets”, “devices” and “machinery” to describe the workings of actions in talk (1992 passim). While scholars recently started to dismiss these terms as reifying notions of times past (e.g. Watson 2015), Heritage’s research on epistemics is once more steeped in metaphors evoking the natural sciences. While the comparison of a turn of talk with a “complex organic molecule such as a protein” seems mostly used an evocative metaphor to illustrate the multi-faceted nature of talk (cf. Heritage 2012a: 25), there is a second set of more recurring mechanical metaphors, consisting of hydraulics, engines and tickers, that seem constitutive to the novel understanding of talk-in-interaction found throughout the literature on epistemics.xix
The domain of epistemics, considered as ethnomethodological “background knowledge” (Heritage 2012a: 25), is described as an engine that drives sequences through its tendency to “level off” imbalances in information that are constantly produced throughout interaction (Drew 2012). According to the critics, information in interaction is hereby envisioned as a “flow of a fluid that seeks equilibrium” (Lynch 2016: 533). This flow motivates speakers to request and convey relevant information to resolve imbalances that occur throughout interaction. Within this epistemic framework these imbalances are an asymmetrical dimension persisting through all forms of interaction, something considered an inherent quality of “speech act agency” by proponents of this new turn in conversation analysis (cf. Enfield 2011: 301-302; 303f.).
Whereas the field of hydraulics describes the mechanical movement of increasing and decreasing pressures for resolving the imbalances in liquids, the asymmetry in the realm of epistemics is attached to epistemic statuses that find their moment-through-moment expression in epistemic stances (cf. Heritage 2012a). Information is conceived of as flowing between speakers with a high information status, denoted with a K+, to speakers with a low status, denoted as K-. These statuses are produced through interaction and positioned relative to each other, introducing a normative component in the movement of information between speakers. This because the local orientations to knowledge asymmetries also implies that speakers “orient to the normatively organized social distributions of authoritative access to bodies or types of knowledge” (Drew 1991: 45).
These positions of more or less authoritative access, codified by the “K+” and “K-” pair, are not only linked to these bodies of knowledges as absolute statuses wherein someone knows more in general than the other, but could also be used to indicate that one knows relatively more than someone else (Enfield 2011: 301-302). However, Heritage proposes to reserve the codes for the relative expressions of knowledge and use the terms ‘ knowing ’ and ‘unknowing’ to refer to claims absolute epistemic advantage (2012d: 377). With these codes the movement of information in interaction could be described as flowing between two or more speakers located on a gradient position between the ideal typical asymmetrical pairings of “K+” and “K-” and “K-” and “K+” (Heritage 2012a; cf. Enfield 2011: 301-302). While both the K+ and K- expression through their respective stances could be sequence initiating
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or result in the expansion of a sequence (Heritage 2012d: 388), but the more knowing stances tend to invite sequence closure while the less knowing stance tends to invite sequence expansion (cf. Heritage 2012d: 378).
Ticker and orientations
The movement of this fluid like information is thus pressured towards resolving imbalances in a motion that has been has been described akin to a “seesaw” that drives sequences forward until the asymmetry between the K+ and K- position is, at least “for all practical purposes”, equalized (cf. Heritage 2012b). In the enactment of superior an inferior knowledge positions through epistemic stances, the informational imbalances are thus on a turn by turn basis managed and resolved in a way that could be codified as an alteration between K+ and K-.
This requires of members engaged in talk-in-interaction that they vigilantly monitor the relative knowledge position of others by means of what has been described as a “continually updated epistemic ‘ticker’” (Heritage, 2012a: 25). This ticker, also referred to as “fast and frugal” heuristics (Heritage 2012c: 76-77), could be envisioned as part of someone’s constant epistemic vigilance that tracks the relative epistemic positions expressed in utterances. A vigilance that is presented as not cognitivist, since one of the features of the indexicality of talk-in-interaction is that it provides speakers with short cuts to assess the epistemic state through interactional means (cf. Heritage 2012a: 25; Heritage 2018).
The ticker is thereby thus elevated to the status of a fundamental heuristic that is not switched on or off, but is considered an omnipresent orientation guided by syntax and the combination of “psychological verbs” combined with pronouns (cf. Heritage 2012c: 76-77; Heritage 2021a: 25). This phenomenon of a constant orientation to relative knowledge situations should not be understood, as some critics implied (Lynch & Wong 2016; Lymer et al. 2016), as something that happens in a hidden “order” but is part of the “background knowledge” oriented to by participants of talk-in-interaction (Heritage 2018: 36). As people are supposed to track the emerging epistemic relations constantly and vigilantly a fair question would be how this becomes evidentially displayed for the study of talk-in- interaction.
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Oh and other potential indexes for assessing knowledge status One paradigmatic way in which the movement captured by the notion of hydraulics is indexed is by what Heritage named a “change of state token” that is transcribed as “oh” (Heritage 1984a). Originally conceived as an indication of acknowledging new information or knowledge, the token was in his epistemic writings retroactively interpreted as an index of shifting epistemic changes of state (e.g. Heritage 2012a). While a “change of state” token might be read as implying a shift between one K stance to another K, the empirical examples discussed by Heritage are concerned with a change from a less informed (K-) to an informed state (K+) or put in more interactional terms as index of the “transmission from information from an informed to an uninformed party” (Heritage 1984a: 304).
Earlier ethnomethodological conversation analysis understood indexical expressions as locally ordered properties and took to the task of describing their function (Sacks & Garfinkel 1970: 159), but here the token “oh” functions also as index of substantive movements in the second fundamental order described by Heritage. The descriptions of transitions between “K-” and “K+” is underpinned by a theoretical understanding of interaction based on hydraulics and could be read as being part of a longer movement towards what was once deemed part of the “formal analysis” found in social sciences (e.g. Garfinkel 2002; cf. Macbeth et al. 2016; Macbeth & Wong 2016) or what recently has been considered the “heretical approach” of coding in conversation analysis (Stivers 2015). While “oh” is presented clearly as “indexical expression” in the sense that the meaning of the token is dependent on its sequential context (cf. Heritage 2018), other resources to interpret turns as belonging to K+ or K- are presented in the form of tabulations throughout the writings on epistemics. Furthermore, Heritage clearly indicates that “notwithstanding the vagaries of its condition as a social construction” determining the relative K+ and K- position is at least for the participants in the conversations a straightforward “presupposed” and “agreed upon” affair (2012a: 6). Together with his suggestion that “West” (2012c: 77), there seems a reading possible where the common experience and language use is imported to understand interaction.
However, Heritage (2012c) also indicates that these positions and their moment to moment expression in talk-in-interaction are linked to an epistemic realm sometimes described as a “multidimensional beast” or, explicitly in the Schützian terms he adapted from Sidnell (2012), as a “topographical map” understood as rights of access to different epistemic territories. Trotting these lands of knowledge moves away from the rigid machineries thus far used to describe the understanding of interaction. Furthermore, it opens up spaces of possibilities wherein certain forms of information are made relevant in the action of advice giving and redraws the boundaries the authorities and identities expressed by “K+’ and “K-” through discongruenties between status and stance (cf. Heritage 2013a: 573).
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Spatial metaphors: creeks in status and open realms The second set of metaphors involved in describing the relevance of epistemic positioning in conversation could be qualified as spatial metaphors and involve the theoretical envisioning of different types of access to knowledge of the participants engaged in talk-in-interaction. These forms of access, and the rights and responsibilities they entail, are considered to be defining the epistemic status relationships in conversation. Heritage’s work is in this regard an explicit development of Kamio’s (1997) Territories of information. These territories, sometimes called “epistemic domains” (e.g. Heritage 2012a), are understood as generic spatial short hands to express a speaker’s relation to the information oriented to (Heritage 2012d; cf. Hayano 2011). These relations could subsequently be mapped by the relative position the speaker on a continuum from “0”, for highly distant, to “1” for extremely close and possessed by the speaker (see figure 4 for a representation). This simple schematic represents the relative “information situation” of each speaker (Heritage 2012d: 375). Speakers are thus not only in a more or less knowing position relative to each other, but this relative position is defined by their supposed access to the relevant information domains.
Already present in the work of Kamio is the notion that this information situation does not only express who “knows what in what way”, but also “the rights to know and express it” (Heritage 2012d: 375f). While these differences between (not) knowing and being supposed to (not) know are dynamic and relative, they also seem flattened by a numerical representation that, albeit allowing for an infinite number of possible positions between “0” and “1”, reduces the information position to one scale for every, theoretically individualized, actor to information that defines the interactional situation. One such possible information situation is visualized in figure one.
Figure 4. A representation of the stratified information situation
However, these differences on a quantitative dimension conceal their expression in qualitative material wherein the studied-as-stratified access to information comes to the fore. Heritage combines these representations with more classical work on knowledge in conversation analysis, namely Pomerantz (1980) conception of Type 1 knowables and Type 2 knowables. Type 1 knowables are those to which one has direct access and Type 2 are those
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which are known indirectly by “report, hearsay, inference, etc.” (cf. Heritage 2012d: 398). Pomerantz found that if a person presents knowledge from type 2 in a conversation to someone with type 1, his utterance will be treated as a request for information, which Heritage presents as a further indication that his proposal are in line with earlier Conversation Analytical work. The sort of access to “1” stratifying the interactants is thus largely dependent on the form of the “knowable” and the actors supposed relationship to it in terms of rights and obligations.
As such this realm opens up new possibilities to extend the understanding of possible orientations of participants to different relevant knowledge domains or “knowables”. Besides reconsidering older concepts to envision to social enactment of knowledge, newer concepts could be adapted to furtherly envision how people enact their relative access to knowledge. Scholars working in the neighboring discipline of discursive psychology, in its own way critical of cognitivism in social sciences (cf. Potter 2006), proposed recently to investigate the workings of what they called “O” and “S” side assessments (Edwards & Potter 2017). This to distinguish between statements as predicated on an object [O] or as displaying the subjective disposition of the speaker towards an object [S]. As this analytical distinction is according to the authors not one on one transposable to expressing a more or less knowledgeable position, the s-sided is at most a more personalized or marked assessment than the o-sided one, it might function precisely to understand the what’s more expressed through epistemic stances that is potentially reduced by working with an undifferentiated, all-encompassing metaphor of information or what the critics called the “informationism” latent in epistemic research (cf. Lynch & Wong 2016).
With the combined resources of “Oh” and other indexes, as o- and s-sided assessments, to map the stratified access to knowledge understood as type 1 and 2 knowables an allusion could be made to the mechanisms through which orientations to knowledge are made relevant and emerge in the study of talk-in-interaction. Before utilizing this armamentarium a last addition will be made that mirrors the earlier described conceptual apparatus but focuses on the right to decide what ought to be, or the normative dimension of conduct instead of knowledge.
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Deontic authority Before turning to the application of this relatively hefty conceptual apparatus for the analysis of recordings of talk-in-interaction, one last element of the emerging epistemic research could be beneficially discussed. Since epistemics became a “key topic” in the literature of conversation analysis others began to consider their research as complementary to these developments and proposed a different set of orientations that is, according to the proposers, as present in interaction as epistemics under the heading of “deontic authority” (Stevanovic & Peräkylä 2012; Stevanovic 2013; Zinken and Ogiermann 2011). Sprung from the fruit of research on deciding joint actions, it makes the normative dimension inherently at stake in asymmetrical epistemic relations analyzable.
Inspired by the field of philosophy, wherein epistemic authority was described as having a “sibling” in “deontic authority” (Stevanovic 2013: 18; cf. Bochenskí 1965), these authors argue that people are not only actively oriented throughout conversations to what is true, but also to what ought to be. More specifically what ought to be is enacted by one of the members of the conversation and as such treated as the product of interaction. As knowledge is treated as fundamental in determining what to do, the two dimensions are considered separate but interrelated (Stevanovic & Peräkylä 2012; Heritage 2013a: 569f.). While Sacks used to quip that that “members can't do pure formulating'' (1992: 521), these authors argue that the relationships do not only appear in mixtures of statements, but that there is also an enduring interface between the two notions of authority. While Stevanovic and Peräkylä claim that more research is needed to assess this interface, they also suggest that “participants”, such as medical professionals, utilize their rights of access to expert knowledge as a basis for establishing deontic authority (2012: 317).
Explicitly mirroring the claims of the “epistemic talk agenda”, these scholars propose that just as there is a constant orientation towards differences in knowledge between participants of talk-in-interaction there is also a consistent alertness to each other’s capacities to shape the course of future action. This alertness is guided by a “deontic ticker” oriented to the right to determine a future course of action is called the “deontic status” that finds moment to moment expression in “deontic stances” (Stevanovic 2013). Just as the superior knowledge authority is encoded by K+, one could code the superior deontic position as D+ (viz. Heritage 2013a: 570)xx. A position that is by definition asymmetrically related to the D- position. While this asymmetry is theorized as present, possibly in a more restricted set of circumstances than epistemic orientations (cf. Heritage 2013a: 573), the ways in which it affects action- and sequence formation remain underdeveloped. As there is no notion as “hydraulics” to be found in this literature, one has to make do with assuming that there is a fundamental ongoing orientation towards cooperation in human action (Stevanovic 2013: 21f). More specified to real interactional encounters when Enfield notes that “in the kinds of interactional contexts in which interlocutors strive to build affiliation through the overt expression of agreement, the goal is symmetry of commitment” (Enfield 2011: 306; Enfield 2013: 125).
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Ethics, corpus and transcriptions A researcher confronted with a corpus of naturally occurring data in the form of recordings in the current time period allows for disavowing Sacks’ description of analysis as to “sit down with a piece of data, make a bunch of observations, and see where they will go” (1984: 27). As much work have been done after his death was an attempt to establish conversation analysis as a discipline and the contributors to the Rebuttal special issue are insistent that epistemics as a part of the technical armamentarium provide resources to analyze relatively complex activities through the orientations of members, it seems only fitting to trade the stance of ‘unmotivated’ observation for one motivated by these recent conceptual developments.
While one of the benefits of working with recordings was that they could be “studied extendedly”, a further benefit is that they could be “somewhat” transcribed making it possible for others to agree or disagree (Sacks 1984: 26). Although these recordings were considered “good enough” starting point for analysis because “other things, to be sure, happened, but at least what was on the tape had happened” (Ibid.), the fine grained transcription system developed by Gail Jefferson was precisely meant to retain as much of the interactional detail as possible to enrich the potential for possible understandings (e.g. Jefferson 1985). Variations of this system now stand at the basis of countless pragmatic studies of language and are one of its most eye catching features of literature in conversation analysis and related field and will thus be adopted in the present study. As the complexities of the transcription systems led to a proliferation of difference even within approaches that adopt a “Jeffersonian” starting point (O’Connell & Kowal 1994) and “Jeffersonian” transcriptions are more time consuming than simple transcriptions, the suggestion of a conventional “reasonable economy” has been followed wherein the detail of the transcription is positively related to the amount of analytical attention that is spend on the fragment (cf. Clayman & Gill: 594). While transcriptions remain “virtually endlessly revisable” (Schegloff 1988: 238), they are hopefully considered reliable enough to understand the emerging knowledge relationships in the renderings of conduct.
The corpus of recordings under discussion in this study was made in the context of a larger research project to evaluate the validity of a large scale longitudinal study in preventive health care services for children between ages 0-4 in a large municipality in the Netherlands.1 The parent(s) accompanying the visiting child were informed of this study in advance by letter and affirmed their consent before the recording of the meetings started. This resulted in a total of 42 video recorded meetings made between September 2016 and March 2017. After an initial research phase these have been narrowed down to 37 recordings of which the audio was studied repeatedly. These recordings were stored on encrypted drives and the video material was only made accessible on a computer without internet connection to protect confidentiality. An anonymization key based on Heritage’s (2014) practical advice for transcriptions in Word was followed, whereby three letter codes are used to differentiate
1 The corpus was kindly made available for the purpose of this study during an internship.
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between speakers.2 Although precautions were taken to inform participants about the nature of the data collection, some questions still turned up in the material, underscoring the point that consent should be an ongoing process in research (e.g. Byrne 2001).
Such ethical considerations as part of doing conversation analytical work are not strange as Harvey Sacks, a trained lawyer, working in a suicide prevention center in San Francisco had to deal with specific obligations when he recorded, transcribed and made notes of telephone calls to the center. xxi While a much noted benefit of working with these recordings of telephone conversations was that members were also constrained by this device and could not see each other (e.g. Schegloff 2009: 359-360), one can assume that in face-to-face interaction other aspects as gestures are made relevant. Albeit the transcription of video recordings was possible in principle, as transcription systems have been developed by for example the late Charles Goodwin (e.g. 1980; 1986), the development and (re-)analyses of the epistemic apparatus rest mostly on the presentation of the analysis of audio. It is only in the most recent Rebuttal special issue that one of the contributors, Bolden (2018), works with transcriptions of gestures and gazes. Albeit she shows clearly how these features benefit the understanding of the organization of turn-allocation, the relationship between these inaudible bodily realm and epistemic orientations remains unfortunately unspecified.
2 HCP=healthcare professional, DAD=male parent, MOM=female parent, GOM=female grandparent, CLD=Child, INT=Intern.
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Advice: a reading
The watershed article wherein advice first appeared in the corpus of Heritage is in the article, co-authored, with Sefi ‘Dilemmas of advice’ (1992). It is found in the section on “the interplay between questioning and answering” in one of the celebratory collections of the burgeoning field of institutional talk Talk-at-Work (Heritage & Drew 1992). While other conversation analysts had written on advice earlier, most notably Jefferson & Lee (1981), Heritage and Sefi were the first to put forward a definition of this action that became a mainstay in various forms of applied conversation analysis. They identified advice as sequences of talk wherein one party ‘‘describes, recommends or otherwise forwards a preferred course of future action’’ to another party (1992: 368). These sequences are furthermore characterized by two intertwined asymmetrical dimensions called “normativity” and “knowledge”.
Normativity because a preferred course of action is forwarded by the advice giver and is cast as something a recipient ought to do. The second dimension, of knowledge, is connected to this normative dimension, because advice giving or receiving suggests a lack of knowledge or competence (cf. Heritage & Sefi 1992: 367–368; Heritage & Lindström 1998: 410). This lack can take on a range of forms, but by soliciting or receiving advice the parties is construed as having access to knowledge relevant for deciding which course of action should be projected as preferred to the other one. As such the knowledge at play in an advice sequence is connected to a repertoire of doing or having competence in something about which the advice giving party is positioned to know more than the recipient. However, as will be subsequently argued in this thesis, it is not only a case of an advice giving party who knows more. Knowing is shown to be to a large extent dependent on the contextual features of the advice sequence and requires the knowledge of someone who is considered to know less in advice giving analytically understood. While the suggestion in Heritage’s later articles on epistemics imply a retrospective reading wherein the advice giver could be coded as K+ while the advice recipient is in a position of K-, this seems not only at odds with the dynamic interplay mention in Talk-at-Work’s section heading, but also with Heritage’s later suggestive use of hydraulics as metaphor.
Advice giving perceived analytically could thus be seen as a practice that establishes localized dynamical asymmetries between parties. As such it could be understood as a part of the institutional research agenda oriented to the locally and uniquely asymmetrical relationships produced and managed through interaction. In the case of Heritage as those between parents with questionable competence and health visitors in Great Britain. Where the asker of advice is found to “constitutes an admission of uncertainty about an appropriate course of action” (Heritage & Sefi 1992 367). While the advice giver is on the other hand cast as the knowledgeable, competent and authoritative party (Ibid.: 368). In a different medical environment, of AIDS counselling, Silverman and colleagues found reason to extend this definition with a contrast between advice and the mere delivery of information in their work inspired by conversation analysis (e.g. Silverman et al. 1998). This distinction depends on the normative dimension and the personal character of advice giving.
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Advice extent of the definition: preliminary observations Although the literature provides a straightforward and influential definition of advice as recognizable action, one could ask to what extent advice as part of lived concrete interactions is describable by such phrases, especially when one considers the ethnomethodological background of Heritage’s conversation analytical work (cf. 1984; Maynard & Clayman 2018). An example to indicate this problem based on this seminal text on advice giving is that it is, according to the definition of Heritage & Sefi (1992), an action engendering a preference for a certain course of “action”. However, it is empirically found that advice is only most of the time future oriented through recommendations, imperatives and verbs of obligation (Heritage & Sefi 1992: 368-369). While these authors exemplify this possible deviation from future orientations with advice presented as “generalization”, the small corpus under consideration here indicates that an orientation towards the present or past could also be present in advice by means of what one can call a “concrete example” in vernacular terms.
Extract 8, Video 24: 15.28-15.53.
1. HCP Euhj weh ik heb (s) een keer n moeder gehad .hh en (.) die zei 2. hier mijn kind kan wel zitte (.) .h maar eeuhm m- n- m- nog 3. niet zo erg heel erg stevi(h)g en ik wil h'm heel graag op de 4. fiets hebben (.) .hh e(n)
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Ext r act 9, Vi deo 26: 18. 59- 19. 24.
1 . HCP . h
At least two points are worth making for now based on these arguments, the first is that what one might recognize as advice is here presented with reference to ‘a mother’ who is presented as engaged with a course of action that is rejected (extract 8, lines 1-5). A first gloss would thus imply that the action trajectories of the presented mother are put forward as a concrete exemplification of something that is better not done. Both instances contain thus normative orientations and become personalized when the ‘mother’ is replaced by different ways of saying “you” in Dutch (extract 9, lines 5-7). A further thing one might notice is that in the second extract this “concrete example” is mixed with the aforementioned “generalization”, underscoring that mixtures of describable actions are very much part of lived interaction.
As such “advice” as a term could be understood as a notion part of the vernacular culture of everyday life that might be alluded to by a definition, but its existence as practice extends beyond what is grasped with a too restrictive analytical understanding. A point raised earlier in Pilnick’s (1999) discussion on advice and counseling, wherein she argued that the analytical difference between advice and information pivoting on the normative and personal dimension lacks sufficient grounding in the orientation of members. As these “vernacular actions” are nevertheless considered a viable procedural starting point for research (cf. Clayman & Gill 2004: 616; Schegloff 1988: 3-4), the remainder of this thesis draws from extracts containing advice sequences to furtherly structure the discussion of potential advancements made possible by a focus on epistemic and deontic authority. This discussion will start with an explicitly named form of advice giving to empirically substantiate the different analytical strata drawn in this chapter (represented in figure 5), followed by a discussion of the different forms of knowledge necessary for achieving advice in the particular context that is being studied. Thereafter a discussion of the deontic dimension follows, advice will be situated in a context of understanding and the formative aspects of advice on the organization of “identity” will be discussed.
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Figure 5. A representation of advice seen through the analytical armamentarium.
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Advice: Practices in sight The practice of recognizing advice, stated as analytical problem, might be far removed from the concerns of visiting parents and health care professionals working in child health centres. A remedy might be found in starting with the appearances of “advice” as vernacular notion used with relevance for the parties of the interaction. Although advice giving as a practice is in the literature assumed to be recognizable even when it is not named as such, the corpus contains a few instances wherein practice are explicitly called ‘advice’ [“advies”] as in extract 12 (line 15) (see also. This part of the talk-in-interaction follows after the question ‘if there is anything else?’ [“had je zelf dingen die je wilde vragen, bespreken, vandaag?”]. The sort of question useful for opening space to raise concerns that is part of the recurrent set of questions used by the health care professionals and is frequently used as device in the medical institutional environment (cf. Heritage et al. 2007). However, as the questions is raised in a relatively open way, all sort of issues might come to the fore, no longer directly affected by the mandated concerns of the preventive youth health care services.
As the parent raises the issue about nutrition, it is indeed suggested that answering it is not a straightforward affair. His question is not only preceded by an u::h in the turn initial position that delays a response (cf. Heritage 2013b), but after the introduction to his question receives an affirmative orientation there follows an expansion by a description of the affairs. In this description the field of nutrition, as a subset of parenting, is construed as a deontic domain, of the “ought” instead of the “is”. This is suggested as explicit orientation by the usage of ‘should’ [“moeten”] in line 8. The response to the question is not only one about knowing when to decrease the milk in the morning and when substitution ideally takes places (line 9), but it is suggested that this has practical implications as well. That “doing” is at stake is made even more explicit when the father suggests that this is something that they already do occasionally, even after the projected possible turn completion point after “boterhammetje” is affirmatively taken up by the health care professional (line 10). Something that underscores the point that raising issues that might involve advice is a delicate practice (cf. Pilnick 1999; 2001; Pilnick 2003).
Ext r act 12, vi deo 12: 0. 58- 1: 55. 1. DAD U: : h al l een even over de v[ oedi ng ei genl i j k. 2 . HCP [ huhhuh j a 3. DAD Met u: hm ’ s ocht ends kr i j gt ze t ot dusver ei genl i j k al l een een 4. f l es- papf l es zeg maar 5 : HCP ↑$Ja 6. DAD En om ( . ) een uur of t i en weer wat f r ui t en weer wat br ood en 7. et cet r a hh. 8. Maar wanneer moeten we dat mel k ‘ s ocht ends een beet j e 9. af bouwen en ver vangen voor een bot er ham[metj e 1 0 . HCP [ Ja Oke 11. DAD Want dat doen we af en t oe al wel 1 2 . HCP J a j a 1 3 . DAD J a 14. HCP . hh Hangt er hel emaal vanaf . Um: al s j e ki j kt naar 15. hoeveel heden wat we een beet j e advi ser en i n pr i nci pe, he ze 16. i s nog- ze i s bi j na één j aar
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17. DAD Ja 18. HCP En vanaf één j aar mogen ki nder en- This instance of explicated “advice” also suggests that treading on grounds that might be advice implicative is not only a delicate practice for the recipient who raises the issue. As advice giving has often been called “dilemmatic” it could also be considered a delicate practice for the formulating side. Even though this transcription contains “advice giving” in its most straightforward form, the preceding claim of the health care professional that ‘it completely depends’ seems to suggest that there is no clear cut answer to the question being raised. The term ‘advice’ is modified by terms, “somewhat” and “in principle”, on both sides in the turn seemingly downgrading the overall strength of the projected course of action (line 15). However, as the interaction unfolds more objective expositions, that seem to strengthen the health care professional’s expected access to the domain of nutrition, are personalized by comparison (line 21). Such a personalization rearranges the informational situation and the nutritional needs of a child are made more accessible, suggesting that the father is closer to this epistemic than he originally construed. The suggestion that the epistemic stance projected by the health care professional is a relatively knowing one (K+) congruent with the epistemic status of the profession, is further strengthened by that the additions of the father to this sequences, besides as a producer of affirmative tokens, is putting his relevant type 1 knowledge on display by providing specificities about the porridge that the child eats (line 32). A second feature of this sequence that further illuminates the precarious navigations propelled by advice giving is that the advice in its explicit form, in line 15, is accompanied by a “we” invoking a professional status with access to knowledge about nutrition. This is followed by o-sided statements about the needs of children in general (lines 18-19; 23-24), strengthening the picture that the health care professional knows what she talks about. However, the advice here is further personalized in line 28 where a relative openness for the agency of the parents is made possible. This to and fro between the objectified domain of nutritional knowledge and more personalized applications comes even more to the fore in 33 something that could be treated as advice, albeit not explicitly marked as such, in line 33. This time the ‘advice’ is given from the more personal perspective of an ‘I’ [“ik”]. Indicating that the advice is precarious as it emerged in the context of allowing room for the parents to act and is presented as a more personal suggestion instead of something mandated by the institutional role. This statement in lines 33-35 is also the first statement hearable as referring to a concrete action the parent could undertake. Preceding this suggestion is a hypothetical conversation between the father and the doctor presented by the latter (lines 26-27), suggesting that this element of the advice sequence depends on the personal information exchange that preceded it. There occurs some trouble in this turn, such as “hou” instead of “haal” and the portrayal of the father [“je”] is cut short. And while there is indeed a grave difference in the amount of information compared to the initial statements of the father (in lines 1-19), the exchange might also indicate the level of access to more personal knowledge necessary for the formulation of advice. The resulting understanding of advice giving as practice based on the information situation that could be sketched from this segment is graphically represented in figure 6. The descriptive endeavor continues with a discussion of the dynamic interplay between the K+/K- dynamic followed by a discussion of the potential of relating the K+/K- and interplay to the deontic relationship through the recurrent problematized domain of nutrition. Thereafter a step back is taken to discuss the environment of advice giving and the potentials Figure 6. A representation of advice based on the information situation found in extract 12. 34 Advice formation: The importance of knowledge transmission As the epistemic domains to which people orient during conversation and their “rights of access” to these domains are relative constructs in interaction, one could imagine that the shape and trajectory of advice is largely dependent on how the interaction shapes the transposition of information from one speaker to the other. As advice is already in its mundane environment a precarious affair (cf. Jefferson & Lee 1992), a site that is considered to be marked by asymmetrical access to knowledge domains seems primed for grave misalignments. Professional information needs to be transposed from the advice giver to the recipient and the personal information, accessible by the recipient, is considered to inform the stance of the advice giver. The situation is, considered from some distance, describable as one wherein “the standpoint of the “experiencer” is frequently played off against that of the “expert,” with results that are often uncertain” (Heritage 2012c: 77). While these uncertainties might exist without being problematic, they might also lead to trouble. As classical conversation analysis has pointed out that in principle everything in talk can be a source of trouble, but is also in principle “repairable” (Schegloff et al. 1977: 363), one can imagine that there are many places in which trouble affects the sequential developments of the meeting. Some occurrences of trouble are repaired with seemingly little effect on the transmission of relevant information: Ext r act 13, Vi deo 030: 2: 36- 2: 49. 1 MOM Hi j l egt bl okken ( . ) 2 HCP J a . 3 MOM Hi j kl apt gr aag 4 HCP J a . 5 MOM Hi j - ehm ( . ) met l i edj es: eh doet i e mee. 6 GOM $Goedzo / / t o chi l d. 7 HCP Wat zegt u met?= 8 MOM - > Met l i edj es: 9 HCP Sor r y, i k ben aan een kant ( ( - i s/ heel ) ) sl echt hor end. 10 MOM Oh met l i edj es ( . ) dan gaat ‘ i e mee doen. 11 $Goedzo i n het doosj e. Ja. Ui t pakken der i n doen. //to child Others instances are more complex and suggest that what become sources of trouble in talk are fundamentally shaping the understandings oriented to in advice sequences. This type of trouble might arise from mundane issues as fluency and competence in Dutch language use. Although these matters could be seen as vested with political implications, as they are about the available resources in making oneself clear in vital domains in life, they are even without a firm linkage back to the macro level of uneven distributions of language competencies instructive in showing the mechanisms whereby forms of inequality are made relevant in situated interaction. There is for example one meeting wherein a mother with a child (age 3), discusses nutrition, with some evident problems in understanding resulting in the mobilization of repair. The extract indicates how advice giving is dependent on the transfer of information achieved in interaction. Although it is an analytical challenge to mark something as a potential misunderstanding if it appears to be understood by the recipient (cf. Schegloff 35 1996: 173f.), the transcribed interaction presents advice giving, once more called as such (line 23) as extending from a description of a bottle. It is from the outset not clear if the mother wants to indicate that the child is drinking from a bottle, a cup or a trainer or sippy cup, as there is much ambiguity in both turns of the mother wherein the object is described (lines 11-12; 16). Furthermore, it remains unclear how the Dutch term “speen” is to be related to a bottle or cup. While there are other instances in the corpus wherein drinking aids are discussed as less than desirable after a certain age, the healthcare professional constructs a clear interrogative by stressing the ‘bottle’ (“fles:?”). Besides morphosyntaxical and intonational properties, there is supposedly an epistemic orientation present in this interrogative towards specific information in a field to which the mother has more direct access. However, her superior position in this part of the epistemic field is both negated by the deontic authority that makes clear that this is a bad practice and an epistemic one, because they are meant for babies, not children (lines 17-18). Albeit hardly interpretable in terms of hydraulics, the deontic orientations seemingly take the overhand as the initial openness and objections of the utterances of the mother (lines 10-15) are actively denied (throughout). Ext r act 14, vi deo 20: 5: 19 - 6: 42. 4. HCP: .hh ↑hoe gaat het eten? 5. Mom: ja andere dinges eh: gaat eh goed en hij drink d-eh oo(k)- veel(h)eel veel ((i t iaans)) watere:h drink[e: 7. VK: [veel water 8. MOM: ja veel water en twee keer tsjocolademelek (.) met de fles: 9. niet de hel- hele tijd alleen in ochtend hh e(n) soms van twee 8. keer ((...)) 8. HCP: hh [je z e gt] 9 . MOM: [ op een ( ( . . ) ) ] ((lijkt het/ l i ke t hat ) ) 1 0 . HCP: o k e j e zegt eh met een f l es:? 11. MOM: hhh ↑j a ( m)et de l i ppen da hi j maakt gr oot ni et zo 12. klein 13. HCP: Gee- geen speen 1 4 . MOM: h - 15. HCP: heef t ' i e z' n speen 16. MOM: speen met dat gr ot e:h [d- r ondj e 1 7 . HCP: [ j a maar hi j i s dr ↑i e hi j moet gewoon 18. ui t een BEk er dr i nke( n) = 1 9 . MOM: =$Haha ↑j a maar eh me t de f l es hi j dr i nkt en eh hi j l aat 20. vol l uh f l es st aan en hi j dr i nkt met de f l es - dr i nkt de f l es, 21. al l een t wee keer ( . ) i n de ocht end enne 22. ° soms ook° t wee keer 2 3 . HCP: - > Ja maar ons advi es i s: ( . ) ui t een beker . Gee- 25. MOM: Oh j a 26. HCP: Hi j i s gr oot 2 7 . MOM: oke 28. HCP: Spenen zi j n ni et goed 2 9 . MOM: oke 30. HCP: ° ni et goed° 31. MOM: z' n spene- eh: ni et zo kl ei n maar hel emaa[ - gr oot 3 2 . HCP: [ Ja maar 33. MOM: zi j n di kker en hi j kan g' woon ( ( . . ) ) gaat j es[ h: 34. HCP: [ j a ] 35 MOM: [ ( . ) ] hi j kan 36 36. wel dr i nken 37. j a 38. MOM: hi j vi ndt het l euk 39. HCP: Ni et doen meer 40. MOM: Ok e j a . = 41. HCP: = ↑Ja want hi j i s ( . ) hh f l essen zi j n voor babys: tot één 42. [ j aar = 43. MOM: Okeeh 44. HCP: =en daar na kunnen ze ook ui t een beker 45. MOM: Oke en hi j [ w- hi j 46. HCP: [ =En één één chocol ademel k 47. zi t veel sui ker i n maar ÉÉN ( . ) één per dag. 48. MOM: Oke: ° hi j dr i nkt t wee° [ ke- twee gl aasj e 49. HCP: [ja Notwithstanding the role that fluency in Dutch plays in the development of the interaction, as turns are started, stopped and (self-)repaired (e.g. extract 14, lines 20-21; 31), understanding is characteristically understood as a quality of the progressivity in interaction (Moerman & Sacks 1988). This is supported by the numerous minutes on the recording that indicate that there is at least a form of ongoing understanding during the meetings. As healthcare professionals are confronted with different levels of fluency in the languages spoken, they interpret and put forward interpretations, just as in mundane conversations, that can be subsequently checked by the other participant (e.g. extract 14, line 10). However, displaying understanding at the right moment is also a fundamental aspect of advice giving (cf. Jefferson & Lee 1981). What stands out, however, was the vague, partially inaudible, initial presentation of the cup (extract 14, line 13) that seems to have propelled the advice sequence. A contingency also found in the different possible meanings of the “speen” and the description of the cup. This because the advice giving of the healthcare professional seems to be highly asymmetrical with declaratives indicating a strong deontic (D+) position and superior knowledge (K+) with relatively few questions that might enrich an understanding. For example when ‘teat’ [“speen”] is repeated by the advice recipient party (line 16), the repeat might also be heard as indicating recognition of the topic shift, it is interpreted in the subsequent turn as a confirmation that the child indeed uses an undesirable cup. When the advice is presented, accompanied by a drinking gesture of the professional, the initial reaction of the mother is ‘oh yes’ [“oh ja”]. Something that would indicate a shift from a less knowing to a more knowing stance (Heritage 1984). Subsequent attempts of the mother to discuss this topic further (e.g. line 31) are met with strong imperatives reaffirming a strong deontic position (e.g. line 38). It is only after three subsequent confirmative tokens of the mother (‘oke’), congruent with this superior position of the healthcare professional, that a different topic is made relevant for discussion, cutting short the last part of the mother’s turn (line 44). As such the advice lies at an odd juncture of highly specific details about the normative dimension of the cup contrasted with neglect of inaudible parts. There seems to be indeed an indication of an asymmetrical relationship between the epistemic and deontic authority positions of the two speakers, but congruency within one speaker. As the epistemic doubts are being resolved after line 16 a 37 relatively strong deontic authority is taken up. The mother’s means to contest this authority are, however, drawn from the realm of epistemics, by indicating that the concerns do not cover the whole of the “bottle” as positive assessments predicated on the child are possible as well (line 37). As the result is a mixture of appeals to knowledge that affect the deontic dimension the next section will cover the relationships between these domains as emerging in the study of the action called advice. Advice and knowledge: the role of asymmetries As the relative relationship between the deontic and epistemic orientations are in the literature only tentatively explored and in need of further research (cf. Heritage 2013a: 573; Stevanovic & Peräkylä 2012: 317), this section will provides a further exploration of the roles played by deontic and epistemic asymmetries in the formation of actions recognizable as advice. As a first indication might function a mother who raises an untowardly state of affairs in response to the institutionally mandated question of ‘How it is going with eating’ (extract 18, line 1). In the subsequent response a problem with ‘pieces’ in the food are raised (line 2). The health care professional asks thereafter if the child does not eat much solid food (line 6), a distinction found in the computer program used to assess the children and parents’ satisfaction. This is part of the environment wherein the mother is asked to assess the developmental trajectory of the child. Something to which she has direct access and experience of (K+), while the professional is supposed to infer this from the statements of the mother (K-). Extract 18, recording 21, 05:17-05:46 1. HCP Hoe gaat het eten? 2. MOM Hij eet wel maar niet elke dag(.) en stukjes heeft ie het nog 3. heel moeilijk mee 4. HCP H[e 5. MOM [ik had laatst euh:n potje met fruit in stukjes stukje ma- en ik 6. had het niet door. Toen kwam alles er weer uit. 7. HCP O::kay 8. MOM ((...)) 9. HCP Hij eet nog niet zo veel vast voedsel? 10. MOM Ja dat probeer ik wel maar hij (h)eeft liever potjes (.) 11. HCP O[::]ke 12. MOM [ja] 13. HCP Ja (.) ja potjes vind 'ie wel lekker 14. MOM Ja 15. HCP O:: maar die smaken allemaal hetzelfde he 16. MOM Ja ongeveer wel ja 17. HCP Ja (.) ja (.) ja However, after the suggesting that “ie”, as referential for the child, finds it ‘quite tasty’ [“wel lekker”] (line 10), which the mother confirms, there appears a change of state token oh (cf. Heritage 1984) followed by a ‘but’ [“maar”], hearable as a return to a potentially abandoned action (cf. Mazeland & Huiskes 2001). In this case it seems that a return is made to 38 negatively marking these jarred forms of food. This reading is furtherly substantiated by an object sided assessment of those [“die”], now used to refer to the ‘food jars’ [“potjes”]. Thereby establishing that a negative assessment of jarred food is not predicated on the child, but on the objectionable aspects of the food. Later on in the meeting there is a discussion about more preferred food, bread for suckling and grain porridge, to which the mother adds that fruit is also allowed (extract 20, line 2), making jarred food once more a relevant topic for conversation. The healthcare professional initially follows the mother’s suggestion of presenting fruit with a more practical exemplification that makes the abstract “fruit” more concrete (line 3). Even though she seemingly suggests that jarred food is also possibility, she adds to this the o-sided assessment that fresh fruit is better (line 5). The mother confirms this explicit normative dimension, and the advice is extended directly to the more practical domain about pureeing food. Extract 20, recording 21, 07:12-07:53 1. HCP Bambix is vaak wat duurder .hh 2. MOM En dan mag ie fruit 3. HCP He dus je kunt een appeltje:h e:h of:eh (.) ˚naja een potje kan˚ 4. ook of een banaan- 5. MOM Ja. 6. HCP Vers fruit is toch beter- 7. MOM Ja beter ja. 8. HCP En je hebt er alle tijd voor dus:eh pureer het en dan kan je het 9. toch- 10. MOM Ja dat doe ik wel s en dan trekt ie een vies gezicht maar 11.HCP Ja 12.MOM even later vindt die het wel lekker 13.HCP Ja daarom. Hij moet gewoon een beetje wennen aan de smaak. 14.MOM J↓a. 15.HCP Ja. Mooie ba-Mooie ogen Ja- .h Euh en dan dus fruit en dan om 16. twaalf uur geef je dus een broodje. 17.MOM .ptuh .ptuh 18.HCP En dan gaat ie weer slapen en als ie wakker wordt- je mag ‘m 19. ook ↑yoghurt geve (.) After the advice becomes even more personalized, by suggesting that the mother has enough time on hand to do the pureeing, the activity also becomes relevant as part of the epistemic domain. The mother indicates that she already does this and provides the healthcare professional with a further assessment of the reaction of the child. This is being presented as a s-sided assessment, to which the mother has access (line 11). The change in assessments of the child is taken up by the professional as potentially indicating the contingency of an assessment predicated on the subject. She presents this as a reason to continue pureeing the food, and talks the advice through as part of a possible routine. This suggestion is based on what has been called a “private calendar”, based on relationships such as those between mother and child (Sacks 1992: 36-37), wherein the former becomes considered as engaging in nutritional activities on a daily basis. 39 While the final turn reads initially as based on a firm deontic authority, since it is worded in strongly prescriptive terms, the post expansion also leaves open opportunities for the parent to interpret the advice and indicates that doing something else, as giving yoghurt, is also something that is allowed. The strength of the deontic authority is in this instance thus constituted by the relative closeness that becomes established between the epistemic domains of nutrition. Both are presented with reference to actual practices as constituted from the domain of expert knowledge. The child plays a pivotal role here by being a contingent assessor, as one who can find it enjoyable or disgusting, softening the earlier rejection based on the child’s rejection and making the course of future actions malleable. A different approach to suggesting that vegetables and fruit are preferable over jarred food is found in extract 21. Here the health care professional starts with providing an additional rationale for why vegetables are preferable, introduced by referencing ‘quite a big research project’ [“heel groot onderzoek”] by a Dutch university as rationale of changing the nutritional advices. Jarred food now lacks an explicitized ‘learning experience’ that a piece of bread could provide. As the mother raises her concerns, the healthcare professional starts a particularly long turn, with ample possible completion points for transition that are not taken up by the parent. Extract 21, recording 24: 2:25-3:31. 1. HCP het gaat er toch om dat ze alles leren te proberen en et ehm 2. uhm-uhm potjes ja dat is leuk voor fabrikant dat die dat 3. verzint= 4. MOM =$d(h)uhuhu 5. HCP maar eh het dient geen doel he met ehm met ehm met ehm stukje 6. eh:: brood enzo kan je: eh: kan de tong wat doen (.) he kan 7. je leren ((stikken/slikken)) 8. MOM maar is dat niet gevaarlijk g'woo[n: een stukje:h fruit of zo 9. of iets 10.HCP [Nee dat nee we zijn banger 11. dan de:uh dan uh dan ons strikt noodzakelijk he we denken oh 12. daar kan iets gebeuren maar een kind heeft drie minuten 13. zuurstof tussen alle in ademingen he (.) als jij eh als jij 14. gaat zwemmen en je gaat eh onder water duiken en je wilt wel 15. uitademen maar dat doe je niet en dat kan je drie minuten 16. volhouden (.) he (.) hh zoveel zuurstof heb jij hh maar je 17. hersenen willen heel graag uitademen en dat eh: is wat hij 18. merkt he (.) zo van he kan ik dan- als het dreigt fout te 19. gaan dan komt het terug in z'n keeltje en kan hij het alsnog 20. inslikken. en en ennuh het is puur een oefening oefening hh 21. die heel veel makkelijker kan op jonge leeftijd dan later 22.MOM Ja 23.HCP nuh ehn kwestie vaneh[: 24.MOM [Ja 25.HCP Ja je moet vertrouwen hebb[en 26.MOM [$Hhaha op God 27.HCP insjallah ja je moet op God vertrouwen he 40 28.MOM Ja: 29.HCP: Ja .hh After an affirmative response from the mother, the story is summarized as advice (lines 23- 25), as part of the negotiation to return to the turn-by-turn talk after a locally occasioned story (Jefferson 1978). The advice statement, understood as an exit device, and the response tokens do not appear to be affected by the longer exposition and as such there is no evidence that the longer talk involved a raised asymmetry. However, complicit with the findings that longer advice designs engenders longer or stronger responses (cf. Heritage & Lindström 2012), the advice is repeated and substantiated, or “upgraded”, by a religious stock formulation invited by the response of the mother (line 26). This might be read as invoking the supreme authority that combines the “is” and “oughts” of the epistemic and deontic domain. The action of having trust is being suggested to be undertaken is thereby elevated to such strength that affirmation seems an appropriate response. Other instances of advice are not as strong in indicating what a supposed course of action is and how it is legitimized, the next section will thus focus on different deontic strengths. Deontic underpinning: contested rejectables While the examples based on jarred food and the earlier discussed problematic of the bottle or cup show how orientations to enacted objects located in epistemic domains might drown out doubts about what is actually meant in favor of professional understandings. Other health care professionals are also confronted with renderings of things and practices that might be construed as rejectable. While a different ‘unknown’ than the previously discussed tout, cup or bottle, the porridge one mom makes is cast as ‘unknown’ by the professional (Extract 15, line 24). While the different elements of the porridge are registered by the professional as “known”, the mixture as such is not. From this K- stance, noticeable as established as early through partial repeat, a sequence emerges wherein an effort is being made to understand what is described and how it functions (e.g. lines 26, 28, 49, 50, 55). Extract 15, Video 9: 3:29-4:51. 1. MOM: eeh j- babies pap 2. HCP: baby pap 3. MOM: baby pap ik hebuh:: zo'n klein stukjes eh kaas (.) witte kaas 4. HCP: jaa 5. MOM: enuh: eieren uh:: geel(.) eieren 6. HCP: eigeel ↑jaja 7. MOM: in gh- klein stukjess 8. HCP: jaa? 9. MOM: k hebbum de: opvol- opvol melk 10. HCP: ja 11. MOM: gebruik 12. HCP: ↑mmhu 13. MOM: en ik heb ik maak pap mee ik geef meestal sochtends: (.) 14. HCP: o(h)ke 15. MOM: als ontbijt 41 16. HCP: als ontbijt(.) 17. MOM: [ja] 18. HCP: dus eh dan maak je dus opvolgmelk met witte kaas: en ei 19. MOM: Ja 20. HCP: en dan dat eigeel 21. MOM: Ja [°ik heb 22. HCP: [Oke 23. MOM: is goed of °nie° 24. HCP: $↑Ja:: ik ken dat niet is da= 25. MOM: =echt waa?= 26. HCP: en daar wordt dat een pap vanuh: 27. MOM: Ja ik uh bambix:: die (.) soort pap 28. HCP: Ja::? 29. MOM: Ik heb euh: °gekoch° bij kruidvat 30. HCP: °°uhhum°° 31. MOM: ik heb alleen maar twee ja ander half twee euh eetlepels 32. HCP: Ja 33. MOM: Die ik uh[: : ] 34. HCP: [°°gebruik?°] 35. Uhuh 36. MOM: gebruik ik 37. HCP: uhuh 48. MOM: daarnenuh kleine stukjes kaas klein stukje eigeel en eh:: ei 49. HCP: Oo:ke dus eh: meluk, bam:bix[: 50. MOM: [ja] 51. VK: een beetje kaas 52. MOM: 53. VK: en een beetje eigeel 54. MOM: Ja met uh als ontbijt 55. VK: als ontbijt 56. MOM: av- ontbi- 57. VK: ↑Ahhaa:h en dat vind die lekker 58. MOM: Ja: u::h hij is alles opgegete $↑hu[huhuh=] 59. VK: [hahaha] 60. MOM: =hij vindt het lekker 61. VK: Oke: nou ik ga eerst even naar die groei kijken 62. MOM: °is goed° 63. VK: en dan kom ik straks weer even op het eten= 64. MOM: =is goed= 65. VK: =terug ja? nou… A further contrast with the stretch of talk about the “speen” and bottle is that in this discussion the mother takes on an doubting normative orientation towards the practice she just described when she asks ‘is good or no’ [“is goed of nie?”] (line 23). It is here that a lack of knowledge of the porridge is indicated accompanied by a suggestion of affirmation at the start of the turn (line 24). This is in contrast to the mother in extract 14 who attempts to explain what she is doing and tries to establish a rationale that is met with rejection. The potential lack in understanding here fills in dynamically, comparable to the “seesaw” described by Heritage (2012b). Wherein K- utterances are alternated with K+ statements from the mother. However the talk about nutrition concludes with a reference to other scheduled actions to be conducted in the meeting and the topic is brought to a close. When the health care professional returns to the topic she presents her advice after a repeat of the normative terminology used by the mother (extract 16, lines 1-2), but without the clear intonational properties of a question. That this is not a real question, but mostly hearable as 42 an introduction to advice from a K+ perspective, is furtherly supported by the position of the in breath of the health care professional. Hearable as projecting that more follows after the potential turn transition point. After minimal commitment is shown by the mother (line 3), the professional employs a turn wherein not only the advice is furtherly specified in its epistemic content, by suggesting that it is the yoke that is ‘somewhat much’, but there is also a furtherly move from a s-sided assessment to an o-sided one (cf. Edwards & Potter 2017). However, the mother does not take the former s-sided assessment or advice statement as based on the problematic yoke, but utilizes epistemic resources she has privileged access to. She indicates that she does not do this on a daily basis (line 6). Something that invokes an “oh” token in the response indicating that there is indeed a shift in the understanding of the professional (Heritage 1984). Before she completes her turn that could be heard as furtherly moving towards this epistemic resource, the mother raises [or upgrades] her denial both on the propositional level by adding “never” in her partial repeat of her previous turn and by adding “nee” repeatedly. The string of these negative response tokens is repeated, as if the resistance is acknowledged, and the mother specifies her practices in a positive form. As if against the further potential of advice resistance on epistemic grounds, the cheese and egg yolk is furtherly assessed, after checking the new interpretation of the practices (extract 16, lines 13-17). As “best –eh” is taken by the mother as a turn transition point, even though it is not hearable as a completed sentence, she adds ‘heavy he’ [“zwaar he”]. As such there is an agreeable assessment being made that makes the rejection of the nutritional practice understandable for the parent. This is in grave contrast to the unanswered contingencies in understanding in extract 14. Extract 16, Video 09: 10:52.13-12:00 1. HCP Ja en die pap he je vroeg net aan 't begin van mijn verhaal is 2. dat goed zo .hh ik zou ’t niet(h) elleke dag doen 3. MOM Mm 4. HCP Elke dag eigeel da's best een 43 21.HCP Nachtvoedingen die kunnen eruit zet ik hier even pap met ei kaas 22. nou zeg maar twee keer per week bijvoorbeeld he 23.MOM (...) 24.HCP Als dat op die manier doorgaat dan d- d- denk ik dat dat gewicht 25. steeds meer eh: (.) ja mooi in 't gebied (.) in de groeicurve 26.MOM Nou eh 26.HCP pt. Furthermore, by transposing the advice giving to a place after weighing and measuring the child, it becomes possible to refer to the supporting electronic devices a healthcare professional have at their disposal. The professional can now easily combine the nutritional practices to the growth trajectory. This might be complicit in the healthcare professional proposal to temporarily close the discussion until after the measuring and weighing suggested in the extract 15. There is now an established imperative on which the subsequent advice can be based besides the descriptions of the mother and direct observations of the healthcare professional. In this advice context the previously described porridge plays an important part and besides the breastfeeding other suggestions are being made that might affect the growth curve that is being presented as deviating from normality. The epistemic doubts about the content of the porridge did thus not result in deontic doubts on the desirability of the nutritional practices and the combined authoritative positions of the healthcare professional might even be established as relatively stronger due to taking in the specificities raised by the parent. Advice and “identity” or a focus on actors As the relative access to epistemic domains is not only expressed in the more durable status, but also finds it moment-by-moment expression in stances, advice giving sequences lend themselves for assessing the presupposed congruency between the two concepts used to refer to persons. In the more classical consideration of such persons references in talk-in- interaction they are considered through the lens of actions, showing, for example, that besides the constitutive features of the immediate context, there exist a preferences for minimization and the use “recognitionals” or names (cf. Sacks & Schegloff 1979). Albeit no preference of such analytical status could be derived through a consideration of two extended cases, it can be shown that the epistemic and deontic domains implicative in advice could be utilized to readdress the actor bound conceptions foundational in institutional talk and epistemic research. To investigate the procedural consequentiality of orientations to the epistemic domains on institutional identity an extract might be instructive wherein the expected asymmetrical access to the medical and experiential domains is in tension with access as represented by the notion of doctor and parent. In this meeting not only the conduct with the parent(s), but also interaction with the child that plays a noticeable role relevant for the development of this advice sequence. A theme commonly neglected in the study of pediatric medical encounters (cf. Tates & Meeuwsen 2001; Clemente 2009). In the following extract it 44 is the coughing of the child (line 4), that is noticed by the health care professional that raises one of the recurrent epistemic domains in this rendering of medical interaction. Ext r act 29, vi deo 33, 03: 39- 3: 50xxi i 1. HCP: Gaan we doen h↑oor (.) 2. CLD: . huh[ uh . h] uhu . hu. hu 3. HCP: [ Ok ej : ] 4. CLD: - > . Pt huhu 5 . HCP: Je bent wel l ekker een beet j e ver kouden h↑e 6. DAD: Daar wou i k het ook over hebben ↓euh: hi j heef t echte of i esj 7. chr oni sch hoest en maar e bl i j f t bi j hem ge- een paar 8. maanden gewoon bl i j f t hoest en i n de nacht . Following up on the initial gloss of the professional, seemingly addressed to the child, the father responds to this by mentioning that this is also something he would like to talk about. He introduces this constellations of themes at first called ‘chronic cough’ [“chronisch hoesten”], but later preemptively diagnosed as bronchitis following the suggestion of the father (extract 30, lines 3; 5). While it is more common for parents to raise potential diagnoses for their children than adults do in health care settings meant for them (cf. Stivers 2006), the father is, as a result of using such a term, suggesting access to what has been called the medical domain, something to which his status would not suggest that he has sufficient rights. This is in line with the subsequent contestation of this interpretation by the professional as she undermines his rights of access to this expert domain by suggesting that a pediatrician should diagnose this (line 6). Ext r act 30, vi deo 33, 3: 57- 4: 46 1. DAD: Hi j i s al vaker opgenomen voor deh: l ongont st eki ng ( . ) e hi j 2. heef t een puf j e ( . ) dat hel pt hem:eh heel veel 3. HCP: Dus een beet j e br onchi t i s acht i ge kl [ acht en 4. DAD: [ misschi en i s het 5. br onchi t i s e: h . h 6. HCP: h. dat moet een ki nder ar t s di agnost i cer en he 7 . DAD: J a . 8. HCP: ben j e al bi j de ki nder ar t s geweest ?= 9. DAD: =Nee daar zi j n we nog ni et geweest . 10. HCP: Dan zou i k gewoon [ ef f e vi a de hui sar t s ver wi j zen naar de 1 1 . DAD: [ oke 12. HCP: ki nder ar t s 1 3 . DAD: Ok e 14. HCP: Want dan zi t di e i n de molen misschi en moet di e naar 15. de KaeNO ar t s omdat di e misschi en ook veel ( . ) eu: h 16. KaeNOprobl emat i ek heef t . 1 7 . DAD: Ok - NAH hi j heef t al bui sj es en hi j ( ( . . ) ) 18. HCP: Oh, dus j e bent al bi j de kaeno ar t s geweest ? 19. DAD: Ja. 2 0 . HCP: ↑Goh ki nd nou dat i s ↑wel wat he: >Nou dat i s ook de r eden 21. dat i e misschi en acht er l oopt met >de spr aak t aal < h↑e= 22. DAD: =>Ja kl opt daar voor had di e ook bui sj es gekr egen 23. HCP: Ah dat i s dan mooi , dus daar was dan al een hel e 24. voor geschi edeni s aan voor af gegaan. 45 25. DAD: Ja. As it becomes established that the child is already attending specialized ENT healthcare (lines 18-21), and has furthermore undergone surgery, it is no longer tenable that the person speaking from the position of the father has only access to the direct experiential domain often contrasted with the expert domain (e.g. Heritage 2012c: 77). Albeit the candidate diagnoses is downgraded by the use of ‘maybe’ (line 4), the indication that he has already visited the ENT healthcare prompts a change of state token in the turn initial position (line 18) indicating that this was new information. The advice to seek out specialized healthcare results thus in a change of the interactionally construed information situation, suggesting a shift in deontic position. Furthermore, albeit the final turn of the healthcare professional in this extract lacks the common prosodic characteristics of a question, the subsequent response of the father makes it hearable as a question raised from the K- position indicating a shift in the asymmetrical relationship commonly attributed to medical contexts (cf. Pilnick 2011). However, while bronchitis as candidate diagnosis might have been raised in an earlier medical context and knowledge of specialized healthcare is now conceived of as closer to the parent as was initially expected, the newly formed identity as parent-with-some-access-to- medical-knowledge does not entail a parent-with-superior-medical knowledge. Even stronger the potential for raising gradients of epistemic authority is later in the interaction actively resisted as the parent potentially solicits advice by presenting a consideration that might be heard as a request for advice after illness (extract 31, line 2), more specifically the flue, was once more made relevant as a topic (cf. Heritage & Sefi 1992: 373f.). Ext r act 31, vi deo 33: 13: 33- 14: 30. 1. HCP: En het i s i nder daad i n deze per i ode wel hef t i g hoor . 2. DAD: Ja. ( . ) Zi t ook t e denken over : eh- om een gr i eppr i k t e hal en 3. HCP: Voor hem? 4. DAD: Ja, voor al l emaal . 5. HCP: Ja, maar dat i s dus i et s, daar om zeg i k het . Daar om i s het 6. misschi en hel emaal ni et zo gek om eens eh ( . ) een consul t aan 7. t e vr agen bi j de ki nder ar t s. 8. DAD: Ja. 9. HCP: Om t e ki j ken van: eh omdat i e zo vaak ant i bi ot i ca nodi g 10. heef t en dat j e ki nder en van ( ( . . . ) ) eh di t i s br onchi t i s 11. DAD: Ja. 1 2 . HCP: Of een car a ki nd, noemen we dat he. Car a ki nd, mi sschi en heef t 13. i e aanpassi ng nodi g i n hui s een ander dekbed of eh dat er 14. een ver pl eegkundi ge l angskomt. 15. I nt : Goed hoor . [ naar ki nd] 16. HCP: Car a ki nder en ((…)) Wauw wat kan j i j dat goed ze- Knap hoor . 17. Maar goed e: : h zi j - mij n vr aag over het sl apen dat i s op 18. zi ch goed behal ve al s ‘ i e heel er g hoest . 19. DAD: Ja. 20. HCP: En dat doet i e dan meest al ’ s nacht s. After the professional initially affirms common ground by stating that the flue is currently indeed quite prevalent, the father responds with moving towards discussing vaccinations, something that is considered problematic in the subsequent interpretation of the healthcare 46 professional. This makes the technique of “continuation” available, since the subsequent response of the father could not be considered as problematizing this return (cf. Jefferson 1972: 318-319), and leads to a restatement of the earlier raised advice of recommending visiting a pediatrician (lines 5-7). Albeit the deontic authority construed in this turn is lower on the gradient than an outright ought, as there occurs some hedging with terms as ‘maybe’ that leave room to deviate from the projected path, the subsequent affirmative token of the dad does not provide grounds for interpreting this as something contested. Furthermore, after the term that earlier introduced a shift in the epistemic landscape a strong K+ position in construed subsequently wherein a medical classification of children is explained. As the talk- in-interaction was one of multiple parties, subsequent responses were not available to assess this authority construed from a second position, as the speaker first orient to the actions of the child (line 15) and later return to institutionally mandated questions. However, the implications of this last statement heard as advice, predicated on a potential future assessment of the child as a so called ‘cara child’, seem more far ranging than suggested thus far as it establishes grounds for a medical intervention and assessment of the home of the advice recipient party from a medical standpoint. Even though this is only a potential future trajectory, the qualification ‘what we call it’ seems to mark precisely the difference between identities with the rights and obligations to access the medical and the more removed position from the father, dependent on type 2 knowables when it comes to this sort of information. As these sort of interactions wherein professional understanding are utilized to make sense of daily life are not an uncommon phenomenon, see for example the concept of “proto- professionalization” in the established Dutch healthcare sociology (De Swaan 1989), the corpus contains more instances wherein recourse is found in orientation to expert knowledge from parties other than the healthcare professionals. Another example wherein the stance of the advice recipient does not seem to follow the typical asymmetrical relationship between lay person and professional or parent and doctor is 38. Here the parent presents his child’s eyes as potentially problematic, following the remark of the healthcare professional that there was a note to pay attention to the eyes. There is talk about watering eyes, inflamed eyes or possibly dry eyes. Which is at first assessed by the medical professional by questions about to condition from a K- stance which results in a description of symptoms and parts of the medical history. Although candidate diagnoses are made by the professional, none are conclusively taken up before extract 32 begins, and the turn presented on line 1 starts immediately after an earlier visit to the doctor’s which had as a conclusion that it ‘was not very serious’ [“was niet heel erg”]. Ext r act 32, vi deo 38: 4: 13- 4: 45. 1. DAD Eu: hm: Mij n moede( h) r di e zel f hui sar t s i s( h) st el de wel voor om 2. ook een monst er t j e t e l at en maken. Gewoon om t och t e ki j ken= 3. HCP =of d’r inz[it 4. DAD [ of er ni et een soor t i nf ect [ i e: 5 . HCP [ Ja 47 6. DAD Ni et i et s i s( h) wat ze ( . ) t och heef t meegekr [ egen. 7 . HCP [ja 8. Ja. >Di e dacht < ni et aan een: eh di cht e t r aanbui s? 9. DAD UHh: nee vol gens mi j ni et ( . ) omdat t euh ( . ) i k denk omdat ze 10. het i n het begi n wel hadden en t oen op een gegeven moment l eek 11. dat ( . ) o[ ver ] 12. HCP Ja [ be- ] ja ja 13. DAD En i k denk ( ( ook het gen) ) 1 4 . HCP En waar om i k et ook had opgeschr even i s dat ( . ) haar 15. moeder was ( . ) euh was vol gens mij scheel - scheel zi cht ge[ had. 16. DAD [ j a. Albeit part of this argument might find unwelcome support by being presented after the previous extract since the advice there was affected by the presumed accessibility of knowledge domains, while this specimen does not develop in advice at first. However, it is precisely noticeable that other potential physical problems develop into more explicit advice. Such as the murmur of the heart and possible cases of hearing problems for which more specialized health care diagnostics are suggested. As the expert knowledge of the mother is brought up, the healthcare professional latches on a turn that projected continuation and it is repaired in the subsequent turn of the father (line 4). Furthermore, the expert knowledge oriented to by the parent reads first of all as a type 2 knowable, but the orientation of the health care professional makes it clear that it was not something that needs to be expanded upon. Before the eyes are tested the mother features a second time, after recommendations were being made to visit an ENT and visiting the general practitioner was suggested to check the murmur of the heart. Although the advice recipient party does not indicate that he intends to consult his mother initially, the advice giver provides this as further interpretation (line 6) that is not resisted, but might have been “upgraded” by utilizing ‘precisely’ [precies]. However as the healthcare professional ventures on the track of providing a further rationale for the advice-recipient’s projected intention to consult his mother she ends her turn with laughter (line 8). Laughter that is initially not taken up by the advice-recipient party, indicating that what might be hearable as an invitation to make light of the situation is declined by a subsequent serious turn wherein the identity of the mother is again precisely what counts (line 9) (cf. Jefferson 1985). It is only later after an additional rationale has been provided, wherein the medical domain is construed as something that could be “too much”, that the laughter is taken up by the recipient party (line 12). Ext r act 33, vi deo 38: 15: 02- 15: 24. 1. HCP: maar de meest e o- ruis is- zi j - wordt dus hel emaal ni ks 2. gevond[ en 3. DAD: [ Ne e [ he 4. HCP: [ i s het gewoon onschul di g ( . ) 5. DAD: Oke ( . ) Ma dat ga i k gewoon ef f e( h) ( . ) over l eggen 6. HCP: over l egeh met j e moeder di e e: uh 7. DAD: Pr eci es 8. HCP: t och al HUI sar t s i s $haha 9. DAD: Ja pr eci es di e euh [ dat i s een goei e bal ans t usse: h wa t - 48 10. HCP: [ maar we kunnen dus wel vast - 11. HCP: Dus i k kan e: h 12. DAD: Wat i s t e veel medi scheh: =$hu[ hu 13. HCP: [ Dus i k kan zeker een 14 ver wi j zi ng schr i j ven, dan moet en j ul l i e gewoon even BELl en 1 5 . DAD: Ja. 1 6 . HCP: vol gende week al s jullie willen. 17. DAD: i s goed. It seems however that the healthcare professional already followed the orientation towards the seriousness at hand and positions her utterances congruent with the K+ and D+ authoritative stances construed by the father. As a parent closer, albeit indirect or type 2 (Pomerantz 1984), to the medical expert domain understood as “1” in the descriptions of the information situation, her follow up suggestions indicate services extending beyond what is already available at hand. Initially presented as something as a service provided aside consulting the mother-cast-as-expert, the healthcare professional attempts to indicate that further services could be provided (lines 10-11). In an utterance that due to the use of ‘certainly’ [“zeker”] and ‘just’ [“gewoon”] initially reads as a colloquial suggestion, that as a completed turn seems to construe a new form of deontic authority, marked by the use of ‘ought’ [moeten], but leaves open ample of room for the parents to take this up in the future or not (lines 13-14). Although this proposal is initially accepted and the sequence is brought to closure, the eye problematics as topic in which an epistemic or deontic authority could be construed in the process of advice giving is not. However, the subsequent place where this issue is raised is not directly after the testing of the eyes. The turn is initiated with a first assessment that seems more positive than necessary. A feature not uncommon in assessments made directly after tests. After the assessment the turn is substantiated by a reasoning that seems to rely on the test as it has just been done, with no trace of the former discussion about potentials problems of the eyes. After the first assessment, the father, provides a second assessment of his own (line 3), congruent with the notion that assessments are done through paired activities with a preference for agreement (cf. Pomerantz 1984), seemingly downgrading the interpretation followed by an upgraded assessment in the third position. Ext r act 34, vi deo 38: 15: 53- 15: 59. 1 . HCP: ↑Heel goe( h) d. Ze kan goed vol gen met al l ebei haar oge al l e 2. bewegen kan ze goed maken ennuh: haar ogen st aan mooi r echt ( . ) 3. DAD: Ok é mo o i = 4. HCP: =Dus dat i s al l emaal >har t st i kke goed<. Oddly enough these eye problems are not taken up in the stretch of talk that is initiated by an explicit indicating of providing a ‘summary’ as only the medical history, or “anamnese” in professional terminology, of seeing squint in the family is discussed. It is only thereafter, 49 when the father indicates that the daughter had eye drops when hospitalized, that the problematics of the eyes are taken up again when the healthcare professional types conclusive notes on the computer first about visiting the general practitioners for hearing problems (extract 35). The eye problematic does surface again, however, near the end of the meeting when the recommendations are first explicitly summarized while going through the computer program to look at the plot and make notes. As an overhearer oriented to the initial sketch of a problem, it was noticeable that it was left out of her account and only after the father engaged once more with by describing that when his daughter was hospitalized she received antibiotics for the eyes, not for the ears as per the original suggestion of the professional, the problematic is then again engaged with once more when the healthcare professional writes about the eyes (line 1). Albeit the turn pre-facing presented as first evokes a sense of completion the spacious silence, much longer than the silences of 0.9 and 2.2 that Jefferson considered in her paper looking for a ‘standard maximum’ (1988), is not taken up as a possible turn transition point. It might be that the activity of typing, or the pragmatic or grammatical incompletes of the turn constructional unit (cf. Schegloff 2007b: 4-7), projected that there was more to come. As the turn seems construed to both acknowledge what has been said earlier as indicating an advance from a deontic inferior position, as one suggested possibility amongst many, the upkeep is in first instance minimal (line 3). One could notice that there is now no longer the suggestion to consult the mother-as-general-practitioner but simply the general practitioner, furthermore that this might be just the beginning of searching for expert health care (line 4-5). Ext r act 35, vi deo 38: 29: 00- 29: 40. 1. HCP: En voor de oge( h) ( 6. ) Kan al t i j d even over l eggen met de 2. hui sar t se[ : h ( . ) i nder daad 3. Dad: [ huj m 4. HCP: i s dat bi j de- of de t r aanbui sj es ni et di cht zi j n j a: of 5. dat er t och nog een keer ( . ) moet worden ver wezen 6 . DAD: O( h ) ke i s goed 7. (.) 8. I nder daad ennuh of zeuh: mis( h) schi en ook zo’ n monst er t j e ( . ) 9. l at en maken va- (.) 10. HCP: Zo goed- Da t ( h) - zo goed zi t i k ei genl i j k ni et i n di e 11. richtlijne 12. ( ( van wanneer moet k de di agnost i ek doen) ) 13. DAD: Oke 14. HCP: maar g: i n wel t e denken al s j e d’ r zo’ n l as( h) t - ( . ) Vaak 15. l ast van ↑hebt dan zi j n di e t r aanbui sj es dan wel goed ope 16. Dad: J[ a: 17.HCP: [Ja? 1 8 . DAD: Ok e 19. HCP: En j ul l i e zi t t en bi j hui sar t senpr akt i j k ( ( cl ogbur r ough) ) As the response to this suggestion is initiated with a change of state token, inviting a consideration of the change of the epistemic landscape, the turn is not ended after its possible 50 completion point (lines 6-7). Something fitting the findings that asymmetrical provision of advice requires more uptake than a minimal response. As the advice-recipient party continues his turn considerable effort seems to be invested in putting forward the recommendation from the mother-as-general-practitioner, seemingly soliciting a further assessment of this particular piece of advice (lines 8-9). However albeit the deontic authority construed seems not as dominant in relative terms, due to the hedging of ‘maybe’ [“misschien”], and some effort seems to be made to construe a ‘they’ [zeuh:] as a category of people that has the ability to make a ‘sample’ [monstertje]. However, the advice giving party indicates, with some trouble in the beginning of the turn, that this specific suggestion requires more direct access to the epistemic domain. Albeit the last part of the turn is only approximately hearable as a Dutch utterance wherein ‘diagnostics’ [diagnostiek] is its most clear element (line 12), emphasis seems to indicate that specific guidelines mark the boundary between accessible and inaccessible medical expert knowledge (lines 10-11). As the uptake after this advice segment is minimal (line 13), there is a subsequent effort wherein a more authoritative epistemic position is construed (line 14). Initiated by the Dutch equivalent for ‘but’ [maar], the construed project seems to differentiate from what was said in the earlier turn. There is indeed a first part of diagnostics, wherein an earlier potential diagnosis is repeated, not marked by a term as “thinking” indicating that the proposed activity is dependent on epistemic resources. Something supported by the subsequent self-initiated self-repair (cf. Schegloff et al. 1977), wherein effort is made to convey that is not about the amount of a burden but the frequency that might lead to the diagnoses of a blocked tear duct. Something that receives at least the minimal positive uptake necessary, checked in lines 17-18, to continue to topic closure as something that might be pursued furtherly at the practice of the general practitioner. 51 Conclusion and reflection As a study situated after the emergence of newly drawn cleavages between ‘epistemic’ conversation analysis and ‘radical’ ethnomethodology, the thesis presented analyses of talk- in-interaction to evaluate the merits of the newly formed conceptual repertoire on epistemics. By accepting the invitation to turn the analytical resources of these research traditions inwardly, both the newly minted tools and their reliance on common language and experience in this EMCA work was worked through by an analysis of actually occurring conduct as captured in transcribed renderings of health and development reviews of children. As such this thesis hopes to provide a basis to consider the future paths of the combined disciplines of EMCA further, not by working from one side of the fence with reliance on the organization of arguments based on procedures not acceptable for others, but by considering the analytical resources developed in conversation analysis as practical achievement through the lens of, a more or less radical, ethnomethodology. While Livingston notes in ‘[reading ethnomethodology’s program]’ that even after many years of close collaboration with Garfinkel he “lacks his genius” and thus does “not pretend to know better what he says and therefore do not seek to explicate, interpret, or explain Garfinkel’s text nor bring them to my own sense of coherence” (2003: 485), the present thesis argues that at least some sense of coherence need to be found to transpose the instructive lessons found in the published and unpublished material to academic writing. This coherence was found by the organization of theoretical notions in a way that made it possible to discuss the presented conduct as reflecting on the analytical mentality of conversation analysis. As the epistemic orientation are presented as one of the fundamental aspects of this contemporary mentality, complemented by the deontic conceptual innovations, new ways of analyzing the social organizations of advice became available. A technical theoretical framework was developed wherein the dispute about the possibilities of new concepts was utilized to assess the reliance on common experience and language in the vocabulary of epistemic research. Enabled by the criticism of the next turn proof procedure an investigation was started in the social construction of epistemic and deontic domains to show the work underlying the proposed asymmetries between superior and inferior epistemic and deontic statuses and stances. Since these domains contained disputed objects, noticeable shifts in stances and questionable practices and state of affairs, there seem adequate empirical leads to develop the understanding of interaction not from the viewpoint of postulated theoretical asymmetries but from the interactions themselves. As the technical metaphors of hydraulics and the seesaw and the ticker remain noticeably absent in the Rebuttal special issue, this thesis is an argument that the potential of this creative imagination for theoretical renderings based on social conduct remains regrettably underexplored. While the interpretation of individual turns of talk as entailing more or less authority might open possibilities for the development of conversation analysis beyond the scope established with the ‘A simplest systematics’ (Sacks et al 1974) paper, the subsequent loss of the disciplinary characteristic of the next turn proof procedure might indeed result in a different form of conversation analysis. However, against the pessimism of the epistemics of Epistemics authors, it could be argued that the broadening of the horizon of 52 conversation analysis, also allows for the development of ethnomethodology as its asymmetrical counterpart through “hybrid studies of work” (cf. Garfinkel 2002: 100). The ethnomethodological study of member’s methods through the reading of academic texts as accounting, situated, tutorials noted the interactional dependence of important theoretical understandings, as the situatedness of members, and methodological criteria as the next turn proof procedure. Furthermore, researchers are invited to continue the work of an action based analysis of the actor as a distinctive orientation of EMCA. As the study of member’s methods could be extended to the situated work order a word of advice could be that the organization of joint data sessions could contribute more to good dialogue than the critical re-analysis and subsequent writings with personal remarks in journals and privately owned websites. Reflection. As Lynch is keen on citing Sacks’ “It’s incredibly difficult to spread joy, easy to spread information” to suggest the limits of the metaphor of “information” (1992: 245 in 2016: 11), this thesis was an attempt to spell out pathways that could introduce ethnomethodological concerns of members and their praxeology of action recognition in an increasingly codified practice that might favor closure and minimal definitions over wrestling with indexicality. The thesis is therefore located in an interactional environment established through publication. This also points to one of the shortcomings of the thesis as much of the interactional background achieved through institutionalized training in conversation analysis lacked. Furthermore as “identity… consistency, completeness, [and] structure” are considered prime “candidates for Ethnomethodology’s interest in them as some crew’s, some staff’s, some gang’s … practical achievement” (Garfinkel 2002: 279, emp. in original) the thesis worked with a developmental understanding of what a conversation analytical or ethnomethodological study should look like. While the study was originally conceived to be about the action formation of advice as recognizable by both analysts and participants, now made researchable by epistemic and deontic notions, the technical command of the apparatus was considered to be lacking which made it into a study about the apparatus. One might indeed argue that this ethnomethodological outlook is incommensurable with the “empiricism” found in Conversation Analysis (cf. Lynch 1993). 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(2011) How to propose an action as objectively necessary: the case of Polish trezba x (“One needs to x”). Research on language & social interaction. Vol. 44 (3), pp. 263-287. 61 Appendix A – Transcription key, originally adapted from Heritage & Maynard (2006), revised after reading Hepburn & Bolden (2012). Transcription items Explanation Underscore Emphasized parts of the turn. ↑ Pitch higher than surrounding talk ↓ Pitch lower than surrounding talk (.) Noticeable pauses, numbers in seconds. : stretch of syllables ° ° Hearable as softer than surrounding talk CAPITLIZATION Hearable as louder than surrounding talk ? Preceding talk with rising intonation, as common for questions. (()) Unclear. Filled with either a best guess or … when it remained inaudible after repeated listening. Guesses are sometimes distinguished by the use of a slash (/) $ The so called ‘smiley voice’ or laughter. .h in breath h. out breath (h) Aspiration [ indication for the start of overlap, approximately at the place where the bracket is placed. ] indication for the of overlap, approximately at the place where the bracket is placed. < A quick start of a segment of talk, <> Hearable as slower than surrounding talk >< Hearable as faster than surrounding talk = To indicate that an utterance sounds latched to another // Renderings after double slashes indicate orientations not hearable, but deemed relevant for understanding the turn of talk-in-interaction. 62 (Field)Notes i As Lynch writes on radicalethno.org, Discourse studies editor Teun van Dijk indicated that with the publication of the Rebuttal special issue the journal will close as a venue for this debate (Lynch 2016: 1-2). The rejoinders that followed the publication of Heritage’s ‘rebuttal’ (2016) on academia.edu were published online, as “post- closure” rejoinders, appeared in advance of the delayed Rebuttal issue. That the present manuscript lives on as a text in an online depository seems only fitting in this regard. ii Albeit close collaborator of Bob Anderson, and associate of the University of Manchester, Wes Sharrock contributed to the critical ‘Epistemics of Epistemics’ special issue, he and Graham Burton made at least some efforts to distance themselves from what they considered the “kernel” of articles in their ‘In support of conversation analysis’ radical agenda’ (Button & Sharrock 2016) that was presented in the “comment” section alongside the commentary of Steensig & Heinemann (2016). iii Schegloff’s (1999a) ‘Schegloff’s Texts as Billig’s Data’ remains instructive as a text wherein a representative of conversation analysis considers written academic contributions as researchable social fact. iv Garfinkel (1967: 73) indicates that this problem, only solvable with an “etcetera clause”, was a “prevailing topics of study and discussion among the members of the Conferences on Ethnomethodology … at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Colorado since February, 1962”. Wieder (1988) noted that this challenge was stated, but left undemonstrated. However, the undemonstratableness of this problem is illustrated by Sacks with a citation from Kafka (Sacks 1936: 163). Note, that in contrast to other question raised as foundational for sociology, this challenge is specifically concerned with an activity of professional scientists, namely description. v A notion Garfinkel once claimed to have “dreamed up” while researching the work of jurors (Hill & Crittenden 1968: 7). It is also in this context of the Purdue Symposium in 1968 that Garfinkel indicated that he and Sudnow discussed leaving the notion of “ethnomethodology” behind and would call their studies henceforth “neopraxeology” since the term became too much of a “shibboleth” (Ibid.: 10). Albeit counter-factual reasoning has an important place in ethnomethodology vi Anne Rawls provides a different reading of the history of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis and argues that the studies of tape recorded conversations in which Garfinkel engaged with Sacks “are not properly speaking EM [ethnomethodology]. Because they rely on what Garfinkel can imagine—theorize—they are not as empirically grounded as his later work” (2008: 8). vii Another principle figure of sociology, John Goldthorpe, was equally clear in his dismissal of ethnomethodology (1973). However, he called neither ethnomethodology nor conversation analysis a “do it yourself linguistics” in this review article and rejoinder (Goldthorpe 1974), as Heritage suggests (2009: 300). Another notable figure in the contemporary literature was Gouldner who in The coming Crisis of Western Sociology (1970), argued that the research procedures of ethnomethodology were irresponsible and best compared to the happenings of the radical 60s. viii As gloss wherein conversation analysis is considered work in incrementally extending, applying and developing a scientific framework (cf. Ten Have 2007: 7). ix Drew also indicates that there are other cases of “egregious… double dating” wherein contributors to the Epistemics of Epistemics Special Issue utilized interpretations found in what they called the “Epistemic programme” (2018: 10). Drew mentions that Steensig functioned as editor of an early volume on epistemics in conversation analysis (Stivers et al. 2011) and refers to a note 23 in the article of Clift & Raymond (2018) for other instances. As this footnote lists several languages one might infer that he meant note 22 were mention is made of the utilization of Heritage’s work on “oh” in articles by Macbeth (1990) and Wong (2004). A small oversight, but as these writings present a chimera of “serious scholarship” and “insinuation and innuendo”, to adopt Drew’s terms, it is at odds with only presenting the epistemics of Epistemics writings as rife with “inaccuracies, shortcomings, tendentious arguments, false claims, errors, misanalysis of data, misapprehensions and inconsistencies” (2018: 10-11). x The glosses of a priori and contingent might be cast as what Lynch called “epistopics” or common words used and debated in various scientific communities often invested with a “’metatheoretical’ aura”(1993: 280-281). As such the extent to which members of the EMCA community find these terms a fitting description of their work is thus an expected moot point. However, one would rightly note that the issue raised by Coulter (1983) in calling certain findings contingent is closer to the criticism of the “next turn proof procedure” and problems with action formation and not with the contingencies arising from the institutional talk agenda. xi To respect the wishes of those who indicated that this episode is best to be forgotten, no further reference to this episode will be provided in the literature list. The writer assumes that those who are interested know how to find it. 63 xii This article appears to be ‘Some feasibility issues in our study of lectures’ (Garfinkel & Sudnow 1972) a found through a reference in Hester & Francis (2016) Orders of Ordinary Action alongside the unpublished ‘A conjecture about an ignored orderliness of lectures as university-specific work’ (Garfinkel & Sudnow 1975). Throughout these readings one is reminded of the “(if they can get them)” refrain about the unpublished texts and recording found in Button and Sharrock’s (2016). xiii This characterization is congruent with the three approaches identified by Hester & Francis that developed from ethnomethodology, “sequential analysis” and “membership categorization analysis” from the work of Sacks and the later “studies of work programme” of Garfinkel (2004: 21). xiv The closest sentiment to this statement in EMCA literature, aside from Jefferson’s letter (1989) is most likely Anderson & Sharrock’s ‘Methodological tokenism’ where they state “Conversationalists are not human” (1986: 12, emp. in original). This because different disciplines will delineate differently what their object of research is and these different objects of study, of which “conversationalists” is one, do not necessarily add up to a human. xv The assessment of the next-turn proof procedure as an “occult” practice is attributed thus attributed to other disciplines by Levinson (2013: 105). When Macbeth & Wong discuss this they suggest “there is for Levinson a hermeneutic “soft underbelly” of vernacular practice verging on “the occult” (2016: 13, emp. provided). xvi A term adopted from Heritage’s rebuttal where it appears in the context of an argument about “fundamental errors in the [epistemic of Epistemics] group’s understanding of CA techniques and of its analytic armamentarium” (2018: 28). xviiAlbeit it is good that Heritage hedges the “relevance”, with a ‘perhaps’, of him noting that both Sacks and Schegloff were graduate students of Goffman (2018: 46), as this is not only well known, but the biographical relationship between Goffman and Sacks might just as well being used to support further differentiation between the authors. xviii An even stronger resemblance could be noted between the titles of the two parted ‘Story of “Oh”’ (MacBeth et al. 2016; Macbeth & Wong 2016) found in the epistemics of Epistemics special issue and De Sade fan fiction translated as the Story of O by Pauline Réage. Assessing the implications of the resemblance between the titles is left to the reader. xix Both critics and Heritage comment on the illustrious origin of utilizing hydraulics for understanding social life in the work of Sigmund Freud (Heritage 2012c: 79; Lynch & Wong 2016: 545). While the epistemics of Epistemics criticism could be read as reacting against the use of this term, hydraulics and concepts as the “ticker” are noticeable absent in the Rejoinder special issue. xx The gesture of coding the superior and inferior deontic positions as D+ and D- respectively is not found in the publications of Stevanovic and appears to be an innovation of Heritage. xxi The late Sudnow noted in personal communication to Kelly (2011) and others that Sacks tape recorded the telephone calls he dealt with without knowledge or approval from “[director] Schneidemann, the staff or the callers”. A researcher in the contemporary field needs to balance personal involvement and “adequate competence” with the activities under study (cf. Ten Have 2007: 84) while maintaining an institutionally bound ethical front. xxii As Hepburn & Bolden (2017: 75) note, even when utilizing a sophisticated system based on the work of Jefferson, it is still difficult to differentiate between practices as laughter, crying, aspiration and coughing when the only available interpretative resource are the transcriptions. 64